I fundamentally disagree with your point that CSS-in-JS is a result of developers not knowing CSS. That's ridiculous
CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Writing CSS for very large applications that deal with lots of shared components across engineering teams is a hard task. Some of those problems are alleviated by libraries like styled-components.
It's not for every use case and should only be used when there is a genuine need (rather than 'because it's shiny.') But shrugging off CSS-in-JS because you don't understand it is a bit silly.
Excuse the French, but all the CSS libraries are bad because CSS itself is shit. Defending it is the classic textbook definition of Stockholm Syndrome. It is awful, disgusting, incredibly wrong and inflexible for the modern use case.
Care to explain your issues with CSS in detail? I agree it's Stockholm's, but just never can't even begin to state all the things that are wrong with it without sinking into Tech Tourette (ok for me the original sin is that it started by redundantly defining properties and syntax when we had this already in the form of HTML attributes; in which world did that ever make sense?)
- css is not scoped by default. Predicting the effect of adding a new rule is very hard if you are not using scoping solutions or if you are not constently writing new class names with a strict convention
- because of the first point, css is never refactored in most places. It becomes an ever growing monster of a code base
- css selectors are build to write css that depends on html. A lot of webapp should be writing html that depends on a small set of css rules in order to get a consistent ui
Ah I see you're coming from a webapp developer PoV. In that case, I just wouldn't bother with CSS at all as you've got all the dynamics in your hand anyway to set styles as you please. Except pseudo-classes (even hovers), media queries, transitions/keyframes can't be specified in inline style attributes - just one of the many CSS blunders.
Personally, I'm more interested in HTML as a document format in the original sense. Limited as it is, I just can't fathom the blackout moment where, confronted with a very basic HTML document plus a CSS stylesheet about the same size or more written in a completely different yet redundant syntax, somebody would say "yup, that seems like a reasonable document format for exchanging most of the world's text".
Edit: regarding your scoping requirement, isn't just including the id or class of a component in CSS selectors or, when necessary, sass-like nested CSS rules enough of a scoping mechanism?
Ids are rarely used in webapp because most people are using a component based approach. By nature they can be instantiated multiple times so you can only use classes.
The basic approach is to only use selectors with a single class name and nothing else. No child selector or anything.
Then you use a naming convention for class names. The most popular is called BEM (for Block/Element/Modifier).
You might use other libraries. Those work by generating class names for you and applying those classes at the right place. There is a whole set of possibilities here: css-modules, styled-component, jss, etc. Some of those libraries use a separate file for writing the css rules (like css modules). Some other libraries ask you to write those rules next to your react/angular/whatever component (styled-component/jss). Those are often called css-in-js.
All of this is only useful when you are making a webapp.
Why are there trends in software development? Are we trying to solve problems or we're trying to be trendy? Is this a clothing industry?
I would have thought we should use mature technologies that have been vetted and gone through the trough of disillusionment and onto the ramp of productivity. Proven tech stack that I can rely on gives me peace. Older the tech, the more reliable it is.
The opposite of "trendy" is what we need to popularize and make it cool. It should be cool to use a 5 year old library in JS!
How does a technology become mature if no one wants to test it? I get your point, but we need both type of people in the real world: cutting-edge tech enthusiasts and stable products users. The problem is not that some people try out some fancy new tool, it's that they try it at work and waste lots of money without even being worried about it because it's not theirs. But in few cases it also pays off.
When there is change, there are trends. You don't have to follow them, but some are working on what they think are improvements and others are interested in staying updated on them. Be it novel programming languages or javascript libraries.
It is cool to use 5 year old JS projects like React. If you look at the projects listed in the report, you see the graphs going back to 2016. Which is 5 years ago. And how they have been popular for 5 years.
The loaded script appears to be some free geoip/country detection service, that as a side effect, also does maxmind.com/en/solutions/minfraud-services/device-tracking - unsure what it's used for but it's probably for giving a single page app access to language or country by geo
CSS-in-JS solves a lot of problems that people that have been writing 'real CSS' have been experiencing for a long time. Writing CSS for very large applications that deal with lots of shared components across engineering teams is a hard task. Some of those problems are alleviated by libraries like styled-components.
It's not for every use case and should only be used when there is a genuine need (rather than 'because it's shiny.') But shrugging off CSS-in-JS because you don't understand it is a bit silly.