What is CSS Modules and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to CSS Modules
Sass
Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin. ...
Radium
Radium is a set of tools to manage inline styles on React elements. It gives you powerful styling capabilities without CSS. ...
BEM
This methodology was developed at Yandex with the goals in mind that Fast development and long-lasting results for standard projects,A project involves many people,Scalable teams,Code reuse. ...
CSS Blocks
By combining an opinionated authoring system, build-time analysis and rewriting of templates, and a new type of CSS optimizer, css-blocks breathes new power and ease of use into the technologies and best practices that stylesheet developers already know and love. ...
styled-components
Visual primitives for the component age. Use the best bits of ES6 and CSS to style your apps without stress 💅 ...
Emotion
Emotion is a performant and flexible CSS-in-JS library. Building on many other CSS-in-JS libraries, it allows you to style apps quickly with string or object styles. It has predictable composition to avoid specificity issues with CSS. With source maps and labels, Emotion has a great developer experience and great performance with heavy caching in production. ...
Animate.css
It is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness. ...
Less
Less is a CSS pre-processor, meaning that it extends the CSS language, adding features that allow variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow you to make CSS that is more maintainable, themable and extendable. ...
CSS Modules alternatives & related posts
- Variables603
- Mixins586
- Nested rules464
- Maintainable411
- Functions296
- Modular flexible code148
- Open source140
- Selector inheritance110
- Dynamic106
- Better than cs95
- Used by Bootstrap3
- If and for function2
- Custom functions1
- Better than less1
related Sass posts
React
GraphQL
Apollo
JavaScript
TypeScript
Webpack
React Helmet
styled-components
Sass
Less
PostCSS
Bootstrap
Semantic UI
Foundation
React Router
KoaReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.
ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.
React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.
styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.
React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.
Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.
Which #GridFramework to use? My team and I closed on Bootstrap !
On a related note and as far as stylesheets go, we had to chose between #CSS, #SCSS, #Sass , Less Finally opted for Sass
As syntactically awesome as the name announces it.
related Radium posts
BEM
related BEM posts
related CSS Blocks posts
styled-components
- Very easy to use and integrate7
related styled-components posts
For Stack Decisions I needed to add Markdown in the decision composer to give our users access to some general styling when writing their decisions. We used React & GraphQL on the #Frontend and Ruby & GraphQL on the backend.
Instead of using Showdown or another tool, We decided to parse the Markdown on the backend so we had more control over what we wanted to render in Markdown because we didn't want to enable all Markdown options, we also wanted to limit any malicious code or images to be embedded into the decisions and Markdown was a fairly large to import into our component so it was going to add a lot of kilobytes that we didn't need.
We also needed to style how the markdown looked, we are currently using Glamorous so I used that but we are planning to update this to Emotion at some stage as it has a fairly easy upgrade path rather than switching over to styled-components or one of the other cssInJs alternatives.
Also we used React-Mentions for tagging tools and topics in the decisions. Typing @ will let you tag a tool, and typing # will allow you to tag a topic.
The Markdown options that we chose to support are tags: a, code, u, b, em, pre, ul, ol, li.
If there are anymore tags you'd love to see added in the composer leave me a comment below and we will look into adding them.
#StackDecisionsLaunch
ReactGraphQLApolloJavaScriptTypeScriptWebpackReact Helmetstyled-componentsSassLessPostCSSBootstrapSemantic UIFoundationReact RouterKoaReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.
ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.
React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.
styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.
React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.
Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.
- Easy to use2
related Emotion posts
We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.
For Stack Decisions I needed to add Markdown in the decision composer to give our users access to some general styling when writing their decisions. We used React & GraphQL on the #Frontend and Ruby & GraphQL on the backend.
Instead of using Showdown or another tool, We decided to parse the Markdown on the backend so we had more control over what we wanted to render in Markdown because we didn't want to enable all Markdown options, we also wanted to limit any malicious code or images to be embedded into the decisions and Markdown was a fairly large to import into our component so it was going to add a lot of kilobytes that we didn't need.
We also needed to style how the markdown looked, we are currently using Glamorous so I used that but we are planning to update this to Emotion at some stage as it has a fairly easy upgrade path rather than switching over to styled-components or one of the other cssInJs alternatives.
Also we used React-Mentions for tagging tools and topics in the decisions. Typing @ will let you tag a tool, and typing # will allow you to tag a topic.
The Markdown options that we chose to support are tags: a, code, u, b, em, pre, ul, ol, li.
If there are anymore tags you'd love to see added in the composer leave me a comment below and we will look into adding them.
#StackDecisionsLaunch
related Animate.css posts
- Better than css214
- Variables176
- Mixins140
- Maintainable99
- Used by bootstrap79
- Open source56
- Extendable51
- Functions42
- Dynamic38
- Fast30
- CSS is valid LESS, very easy to pick up1
related Less posts
ReactGraphQLApolloJavaScriptTypeScriptWebpackReact Helmetstyled-componentsSassLessPostCSSBootstrapSemantic UIFoundationReact RouterKoaReactQL is a React + GraphQL front-end starter kit. #JSX is a natural way to think about building UI, and it renders to pure #HTML in the browser and on the server, making it trivial to build server-rendered Single Page Apps. GraphQL via Apollo was chosen for the data layer; #GraphQL makes it simple to request just the data your app needs, and #Apollo takes care of communicating with your API (written in any language; doesn't have to be JavaScript!), caching, and rendering to #React.
ReactQL is written in TypeScript to provide full types/Intellisense, and pick up hard-to-diagnose goofs that might later show up at runtime. React makes heavy use of Webpack 4 to handle transforming your code to an optimised client-side bundle, and in throws back just enough code needed for the initial render, while seamlessly handling import statements asynchronously as needed, making the payload your user downloads ultimately much smaller than trying to do it by hand.
React Helmet was chosen to handle <head> content, because it works universally, making it easy to throw back the correct <title> and other tags on the initial render, as well as inject new tags for subsequent client-side views.
styled-components, Sass, Less and PostCSS were added to give developers a choice of whether to build styles purely in React / JavaScript, or whether to defer to a #css #preprocessor. This is especially useful for interop with UI frameworks like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, Foundation, etc - ReactQL lets you mix and match #css and renders to both a static .css file during bundling as well as generates per-page <style> tags when using #StyledComponents.
React Router handles routing, because it works both on the server and in the client. ReactQL customises it further by capturing non-200 responses on the server, redirecting or throwing back custom 404 pages as needed.
Koa is the web server that handles all incoming HTTP requests, because it's fast (TTFB < 5ms, even after fully rendering React), and its natively #async, making it easy to async/await inside routes and middleware.
Which #GridFramework to use? My team and I closed on Bootstrap !
On a related note and as far as stylesheets go, we had to chose between #CSS, #SCSS, #Sass , Less Finally opted for Sass
As syntactically awesome as the name announces it.