Bad CSS in JS

I tried to understand the argument made for styled components vs. ‘traditional’ CSS. But when reviewing these arguments I found out that they typically use bad code as proof for their point.

See e.g. the following SCSS code:

$blue = #5DBCD2;

@mixin button-styles($bg-color, $color) {
  background: $bg-color;
  color: $color;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 0.20em;
  &:hover{
      background: darken($bg-color, 6%);
      cursor: pointer;
  }
}

.button {
  @include button-styles(#ddd, black)
}

.button--primary {
  @include button-styles($blue, white)
}

To pair with a simple component along the lines of:

const Buttons = props => (
  
    Default
    Primary
  
)
export default Buttons

The suggested alternative is:

import themeVars from "myTheme"
import styled from "styled-components"
import { darken } from "polished"

const B...

Creating a link in Vue

Any HTML is legal, so you can just write a regular link, but if you want to have a fast response, it is recommended that you include Vue Router. This brings two important tags: , which this post is mainly about and.

Creating a link in Vue is as simple as:

Home

This renders a perfectly correct link, using the earlier mentioned a-tag. It even adds a nice bonus, adding an ‘active’ class when that route is active. If you prefer this class on the containing element, do this:

Home

This will render something along the lines of:

Home

Be aware: this is the only valid use-case for the tag-property in vue’s router-link component. Hence be wary if you come across any use of the tag-property, but Vue’s default is good.

You pick up on this link by defining the route ‘home’, make sure your app contains a and attach a component to this route. In the most basic form:

…

How do I navigate to another page in React or Vue?

Congratulations, you started working with one of the popular front-end frameworks. Both Vue and React are excellent choices to create rich and reactive applications. But sometimes, you 'just' want to show the user another page. Whether it is a simple about page, or another 'section' in the app. In this post I will cover both Vue en React and, little bonus, “React on steroids”, NextJS.

It is important to know that you need a router to make in-app pagination work. If you look up router and your favourite framework you're probably find a way to do it, accompanied with some ways to actually not do it. Hence, here I'll focus on the right way.

The basics of every link

While you can make everything clickable (or touch-able), it is important that enabling navigation between pages was already a core concept when the web was invented. Even when writing webpages using React, Vue, or most other JavaScript frameworks, it ends up as HTML to the browser (with JavaScript & CSS). HT…

Should I use styled components?

This was originally posted at CoffeeAndOrange

You may have asked yourself if you shouldn’t invest more time getting started with this thing called styled components (or CSS-in-JS). They get heavily promoted in modern front-end application frameworks. And sure, they look interesting.

While it depends may be the only right answer, sometimes you might be simply making things more difficult than really needed. You’re fixing the wrong problem.

Take for example the SCSS code.

$blue = #5DBCD2;

@mixin button-styles($bg-color, $color) {
  background: $bg-color;
  color: $color;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 0.20em;
  &:hover{
      background: darken($bg-color, 6%);
      cursor: pointer;
  }
}

.button {
  @include button-styles(#ddd, black)
}

.button--primary {
  @include button-styles($blue, white)
}

To pair with a simple component along the lines of:

const Buttons = props => ...