Introduction
In the previous courses, you’ll have learned a lot of CSS and all of those skills are still applicable to React. However, there are a couple of things we’d like to highlight. As you’ve probably already noticed, all of the styles we write share the global scope, which means that as our application grows, it will become increasingly difficult to manage our CSS. Some of the tools mentioned below are things people use to help solve this problem.
Lesson overview
This section contains a general overview of topics that you will learn in this lesson.
- Know about ways to style React applications
CSS modules
Regular CSS is the simplest way to style. CSS Modules let you write CSS style declarations that are scoped locally, which means that we finally no longer have to worry about our class names potentially conflicting with other classes in the global scope.
CSS in JS
Why even write CSS in CSS when you can write it in JavaScript? Just kidding, of course!
CSS-in-JS is a paradigm for styling front-end projects. It allows you to entirely take control of CSS with JavaScript and extends it with various features. Additionally, it also helps to apply styling in a logical fashion, e.g. based on state, and also supports modular CSS in the same way that CSS Modules do. There are various CSS-in-JS solutions. One of the most popular ones in the React ecosystem is styled-components.
CSS Utility Frameworks
CSS Utility Frameworks are a popular choice for styling React applications. They provide a set of pre-defined classes that you can directly use in your HTML, or JSX in our case. Tailwind CSS is by far the most popular choice.
Component libraries
What if everything’s already done for you? Styling, behavior, and accessibility are taken care of for you in component libraries. As the name suggests, these libraries provide adaptable and reusable components that you can use directly in your project. These components include, but are not limited to, dropdowns, drawers, calendars, toggles, tabs, and all other components you can think of.
Material UI, Radix, and Chakra UI are worth a mention when talking about component libraries.
For learning purposes throughout this course, we recommend that you avoid using CSS frameworks or component libraries, and instead implement your component’s styling from scratch i.e. use CSS Modules or a CSS-in-JS option.
Assignment
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Read CSS Modules documentation and How to style React components using CSS Modules
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Skim through the styled components documentation
Knowledge check
The following questions are an opportunity to reflect on key topics in this lesson. If you can’t answer a question, click on it to review the material, but keep in mind you are not expected to memorize or master this knowledge.
Additional resources
This section contains helpful links to related content. It isn’t required, so consider it supplemental.
- Josh Comeau has a nice article on getting the most out of styled-components.