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by themafia 199 days ago
It's a great way to make conditional styles without having to use JavaScript; however, having used JS for years to make theme color and icon sets that rely on CSS properties, I'm not sure I particularly like this method. I feel like you have to smear a lot of logic across your CSS whereas with JS you can reduce your theme to a data structure and just have a simple function to setup all the CSS variables based on that.

Am I just an old man?
6 comments
bawolff 199 days ago
The primary goal is to just have a more concise way to do @media queries. Its not intended as a replacement for most uses of JS
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6031769 199 days ago
If we've learned anything from the history of CSS, JS and the semantic web it is that 99% of the time a feature will be used in ways that were not intended. There is no reason to suppose that this will be any different.
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sublinear 198 days ago
You have to consider why, and the answer was often "there's no other way".

The paths of least resistance on the web are now very different. These features were not delayed due to implementation details, but a deliberate shepherding of the standards. The most powerful features were saved for later and even still this is scoped to media queries, etc. only.

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functionmouse 199 days ago
I like making static informational pages and don't know the first thing about JavaScript, so this could be handy for me.
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mmis1000 199 days ago
Javascript always suffer from FOUC problem though (Unless it's server side). Although the if() css function seems to just be syntax suger of standard @media query. So it doesn't really add anything to solve existing problems.

Edited: It seems it can also be toggled from css variable? So it might actually fix some existing problems.

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mikestorrent 199 days ago
How hard would it be to have a response header that tells the browser "don't display anything at all until we ask you to from JS when we're ready"?

Considering the kinds of crap that have been done with headers...

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Tajnymag 199 days ago
Would it be enough to have <body> hidden using an inline style in the initial html response and when everything is loaded, one would remove the style using javascript?
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coke12 199 days ago
Many sites do something like that in practice. The problem is the extra 500ms of parse+eval time for your JS bundle influences user behavior a lot on the margin, so it’s better to not force the user to wait.
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account42 199 days ago
How hard would it be to use JS for progressive enhancement instead making your website depend on it to display simple text and images.
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mmis1000 199 days ago
Practically only cordova does these for now. But it's a native app so of course it can do whatever it want.
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kevin_thibedeau 199 days ago
Just use SCSS to smear the logic across CSS automatically.
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pie_flavor 198 days ago
You're pulling the old man card on CSS-in-JS? Putting your style logic in CSS is what CSS is for, CSS-in-JS is an annoying hack to make React work. What this is replacing is SCSS.
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masswerk 198 days ago
Well, historically, styles were first in JS (JS StyleSheets in Netscape 4.0) and were pulled out into CSS. – This is an old man card! ;-)
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Denote6737 199 days ago
God forbid we use html5
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assimpleaspossi 198 days ago
There is no HTML5 other than a buzzword: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#is-this-h...?
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