thoughts on that “Do We Need CSS Anymore?” post going around
¶ by !undefinedThe Debate Around “Do We Even Need CSS Anymore?”:
As with just about all approaches in software, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and for any given development team, they’ll need to come to their own conclusions about the trade-offs. Personally, I think the “do it all in JavaScript” approach seems like a short-sighted optimization. From the component-based perspectives like we’re seeing with React, I can see why you’d want to bundle style changes to the components — but my gut says this is a slippery slope that prioritizes developer ergonomics over all other concerns.
Consider battery performance on mobile, for example — I’d put even money that mobile browsers have been tuned for CSS performance with respect to power consumption, but there’s probably a lot more overhead in managing JavaScript changes and then having to repaint with all those low-level styles applied at the element level. (To be fair: this is a hunch, and I have no data to back this up, nor have I been able to find any in my admittedly brief and shallow search.)
Keith J. Grant’s “stop pretending” point is a legitimate claim, and regardless of which of the big front-end frameworks you’re a fan of, you’ll find that they’ve all embraced some flavor of this by now. However, I remain skeptical of the wisdom to put all the eggs in that particular basket. I still see a lot of value in keeping these concerns separated… to the extent that you can separate them at all.