[hudbuddy]

I don't think anyone hear hates CSS - it is a convenience in many ways. However when you think of views as a reflection of state, it can become very confusing and "impure".

Imagine you had a complex database of authors and books, and every time you read from it you want to receive the name of the user or the book in title case. You see that this behavior can be abstracted over, so you say "any time I pull a record from the database, no matter what table it comes from, capitalize its title". This is very convenient.

Well, no one would ever do this in a complex application, because you don't know what sort of implications it might have for future tables that are added - or what if you decide that short words in the title should be lowercase? Now you are making exceptions instead of declarations.

This is effectively what CSS does. it unnecessarily couple's visual state to other visual state, unless it is namespaced uniquely to a specific component.

[icc97]

I didn't think so either but this is what I was replying to:

> However, there is a reason why people hate CSS with a passion

So it seems some people do. Going through some of the talks about CSS in JS it seems Facebook and Airbnb are making good cases for the problems they're hitting with CSS especially around asynchronous loading of CSS files.

But having spent lots of time seeing what a mess developers come up with using style tags on individual elements before switching to using CSS I'm interested to see what happens when there's tons of React components with hard coded styles. It seems like a solution that's ripe for creating more problems than it solves.