Atomic Power: the Story of StyleX

This Talk discusses design systems and how to build one using React and Tailwind CSS. Tailwind CSS provides utility classes for building complex layouts without writing CSS rules. Custom colors can be added to the Tailwind CSS config file, and font styles and text sizes can be customized. The entire Tailwind CSS configuration can be customized to meet specific requirements. Base styles can be added to the config file itself using a plugin. Reusable components can be created with Tailwind CSS, allowing for easy customization of size and color.

CSS + superpowers - bloat. How Stylex creates a zero-cost abstraction that gives CSS superpowers.

This talk discusses achieving layout composition in React using Bedrock Layout Primitives. By componentizing CSS layout, complex layouts can be achieved and reused across different components. The talk also covers the challenges of achieving complex layouts, such as card lineups, and provides solutions for maintaining alignment and responsiveness. The BedrockLayout primitive library simplifies web layouts and offers flexibility in composing layouts.

Today's Talk introduces Vanilla Extract CSS, a type-safe styling method for React applications. It combines the benefits of scoped styling, zero runtime overhead, and a great developer experience. Vanilla Extract generates a static CSS file at build time, resulting in better performance. It is framework agnostic and offers a powerful toolkit, including Sprinkles for utility classes and CSS utils for calculations. With type safety and the ability to define themes and variants, Vanilla Extract makes it easy to create efficient, scalable, and maintainable design system component packages.

This Talk explores the evolution of styling architecture, dynamic theming with style components, and optimizing style updates. It discusses the challenges of CSS migration and the choice between JavaScript and CSS native tooling. The Talk also touches on CSS tools and libraries, including Tailwind CSS and CSS in JS major libraries like MUI. The importance of picking a stack based on team members' strengths and the use of namespacing CSS for conflict-free dependency trees are highlighted.

CSS variables and their possibilities for UI developers, MUI's history and understanding of developer needs, Joy UI's focus on developer experience and use of CSS variables for consistency and future-proofing, the elimination of manual calculations and JavaScript with CSS variables in JoyUI, and the availability of playgrounds and a stable release for exploration.