1. React
  2. ReactFoo
  3. 2017
  4. The road to styled components, and the road ahead

The road to styled components, and the road ahead

Glen Maddern at ReactFoo 2017

Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web, and thus CSS, was inherently made for documents. Because interactive UIs fundamentally differ from flat documents, we’ve seen a mindset shift towards building component-based systems. That progression has lead to a rise in options for including your CSS in your JavaScript code, much the same way that libraries like React have done for your HTML. But what can we learn from the progress of the past, and what do we choose to include in a new library? This talk will cover how the design goals of styled-components have helped it become the most popular alternative for CSS-in-JS. But more broadly than that, it will look at the progression from documents, through components, to an exciting new possibility of an inclusive, unified workflow for UI on the web and elsewhere.