In September I mentioned a talk at Strange Loop 2014 where the speaker described a technique for writing CSS in the form of JavaScript which then executes to produce the actual CSS. This avoids a server-side build process, it knows more about the browser while operating, it avoids a HTTP round-trip, and has various other advantages. However, the tooling the speaker was talking about was closed source inside of the conference speaker’s product.
Today I encountered a presentation online by a React expert at Facebook, who uses React’s mapping from JavaScript to HTML+CSS, to accomplish many of the same things and more – using tools openly available.
If anyone knows of a audio or video recording of the talk, I would appreciate a link very much.
My own experiments with programmatic CSS also react, but behind ClojureScript, so I’m writing Clojure code which turns into CSS. It is not as mature as what is described in the slides above, but it adds yet another layer of abstraction in the form of a higher-level language.