There is a lot to like from Mike Riethmuller here:
- The title. When you’re building a website from JavaScript-powered components anyway, that is a moment to talk about how to do styling, because it opens some doors to JavaScript-powered styles that you probably wouldn’t otherwise choose.
- The personal experience and pragmatism. Drawing on five years of consulting, he’s seeing that component re-use and style understandability is suffering, not improving, partly due to every team having different approaches. He says “it’s a little bit of everybody’s fault” and sees the perspective of others who like parts of what JavaScript-powered styles can bring, like less dependence on specificity.
- The fresh thinking. Since JavaScript-powered websites are all built by nested components anyway, why not use that architecture for styling? The thesis of the article is really about building UI components that, on purpose, don’t involve application logic but exist just for styling, and using a combination of clever CSS and JavaScript power to the kind of styling you need.
