cssculpt

We build our components in hierarchical trees, like nested react components. Why not define their styles in the same way?

When I write CSS, I use it to style a component. A component has properties, and states. Simple enough... but what happens when we have, say, a .btn style with 7 sizes, 4 colors, and then multiple states like :hover, disabled, etc. They all start conflicting—things get hard to reason about. That's what's so awesome about react; it makes things very simple.

Lets apply some of the concepts from stateless components && the HOC pattern to building CSS.

Example

disclaimer: all of the following examples are purely hypothetical right now. Although there's already a lot of code written, cssculpt is still in its infancy. This is what it may look like:

import { sculpt, kiln } from 'cssculpt';
import { Color, darken } from 'cssculpt/chroma'; 

const buttonSculpture = sculpt('.button', (props, node) => {{
    color: props.textColor,
    /** optional destructuring for appropriate css rules **/
    font: {
        weight: 500
    },
    borderRadius: '2px',
    border: `1px solid ${darken(props.baseColor, 0.4)}`, // SCSS like utility functions a plenty 
    /**
     * the next line is an example of some shorthand; without a unit (eg: '4px') 
     * it defaults to px  -- and you'll be able configure that default unit
     **/
    padding: [4, 2],
    background: props.baseColor,    
    '&:hover': { // :pseudo selectors, @atrules welcome 
        background: darken(props.baseColor, 0.3)
    }
});
// render the style with a given set of props
const buttonStyle = kiln.fire(buttonSculpture, {
    baseColor: '#ccc',
    textColor: Color.black
});
const styleSheet = StyleSheet();
styleSheet.add(buttonStyle);
console.log(styleSheet.getCSS());

Console Output:

{
    '.button': {
        'color': '#000',
        'font-weight': 500,
        'border-radius': '2px',
        'border': '1px solid #666'
        'padding': '4px 2px',
        'background': '#ccc',
    }, 
    '.button:hover' {
        'background': '#808080'
    }
}

Nothing revolutionary, so far... Here's where things get interesting.

Normally with css. If we wanted to make a small variation on this, like say a button that was blue, we would have to manually go through and create new declarations under rules that have more specific selectors; targeting only a subset eg: .button.button-blue. On the surface that's not that difficult. We've been doing it for years, you're used to it.

But what about the :hover state? You need to specify a background for .button.button-blue:hover. Again not that hard, but say you have an entire pallet of colors, and you decide that :hover should be a little darker. Following the traditional convention, you now have to go back and tweak those values, for every color on the pallet. That's a pain in the ass. Imagine we could do this:

const colors = { red: '#ff0000', green:'#00ff00', blue: '#0000ff' /** orange, indigo, etc.. */};
const coloredButton = buttonStyle.mold((props, parentProps, node) => {
    return node.parent({ ...parentProps, ...props });
});
const colorfulButtons = colors.map((v, k) => {
    return coloredButton.recast(`&.button-${k}`, { baseColor: v });
})

Okay, so this is where it starts to get fun. Let me explain what is happening:

• buttonStyle.mold() takes one parameter, a callback that looks like:

  mold(props: Object, parentProps: Object, node: TreeNode)

  • props is the object that will be passed when calling coloredButton.recast

  • parentProps is the props object that was used by kiln.fire to create buttonStyle

  • node.parent(props: Object) this calls the "render" method we created for buttonSculpture with sculptNode waaayyyy back at the begining. Its returns a new StyleTree.

  So basically we "re-render" the original sculpture, but we merge our new props from recast props into the original set of props passed by `kiln.fire. This way the rendering logic remains the same, but uses the new set of values. This is the simplest example of whats possible! Just using a different set of props here; later on we'll start merging in custom rules and more.

• for each color, we compute a new style by calling:

  recast(selector: String, props: Object)

  We specify a new root selector for this component for each color. They'll look like: .button.button-red, .button.button-green, etc. But the key part here is: those rendered variations are diffed against the original buttonStyle and values which are the same are omitted.

  And yes, it takes :hover and anything else nested in there into consideration too! `

So if we spat that out into css, this would be the result

{
    /** ...same output from the first example...  **/
    
    '.button.button-red': {
        'background': '#ff0000',
        'border': '1px solid #99000'
    },
    '.button.button-red:hover': {
        'background': '#b30000'
    },
    '.button.button-green': {
        'background': '#ff0000',
        'border': '1px solid #009900'
    },
    '.button.button-green:hover': {
        'background': '#00b300'
    }
    /** ...etc, etc... **/
}

Sure this could be achieved with some complex, temperamental SASS/LESS mixins, but this is just the begining of what cssculpt can accomplished.

Contributions

Thanks for reading! I'm working hard on this because I think it has the potential to be huge. If you have any feedback at all, please open an issue. This is a pretty ambitious project, so if anyone wanted to join the effort, in any capacity, I would be greatly humbled.

Roadmap

the sky ain't no limit

There's so much that could be added to this, so much that is possible; here's just a few things:

• crazy nesting with custom syntax

  {
      .Button {
          
          ...buttonStyles
          
          & i.icon {
              ...iconStyles
              
              ^:hover & { // .Button:hover i.icon -- keep dom elements nested in one tree, let them target states on the parent
                  ...iconStylesOnButtonHover
              }
          }
          &:hover {
              ...buttonHoverStyles
          }
      }
  }
  

• Composing styles
• Wide range of helper functions like darken()
  • maybe even node.border('1px', Border.Solid, Color.red) in a NodeSculptor (aka that arrow function given to sculpt() and mold() in the example
• drop-in postcss support (autoprefixing, and more)
• react binding via classnames (similar to cssmodules)
• plugins for webkit, gulp, grunt
• many more