[BigJono]

> Inline styles feel wrong

Care to elaborate? I've been using in-line styles in multiple production projects and to me it feels like the way styling was meant to be done all along. The purpose of React is to be able to define your UI as a function of application state and let the library resolve the UI automatically at run-time. Styles are a part of that UI, so it's only natural that they should be included. What most people end up doing is using CSS and doing something like "state => classes => styles" rather than the simpler "state => styles", but the main benefit to that whole abstraction has always been re-usability, and components already solve that. So what exactly are we gaining by using said abstraction?

Of course, that's only in theory. In practice, we gain pseudo-selectors (which are unavailable for use in in-line styles for obvious reasons), which is a noticeable pain point. In my experience it is fairly easy to work around as I only make a lot of use of :hover (which is all of a few lines to implement), I can see how it might be troublesome to others though. The other solution is of course to use a mix of in-line styles and classes, which usually involves writing in-line styles for component-level styling and classes for global themes and anything requiring pseudo-selectors. That approach seems quite popular on the React IRC channel.