csz

Runtime CSS modules with SASS like preprocessing

A framework agnostic css-in-js solution that uses stylis to parse styles from tagged template literals and append them to the head of the document at runtime. Loading in stylesheets dynamically – from .css files – is supported out of the box, so you can write your styles in .css files and import them via url without having to worry about flashes of unstyled content.

Features

• Efficient caching of styles
• Import styles from regular .css files
• Available as an ES module (from unpkg.com)
• Styles scoped under unique namespaces .csz-lur7p80ssnq
• Global style injection :global(selector)
• Nested selectors a { &:hover {} }
• Vendor prefixing -moz-placeholder
• Flat stylesheets color: red; h1 { color: red; }
• Minification of appended styles
• Keyframe and animation namespacing

Usage

The package is designed to be used as an ES module. You can import it directly from unpkg.com:

import css from 'https://unpkg.com/csz';
 
// static
const inlined = css`background: blue;`; // generate class name for ruleset
 
// dynamic (from stylesheet)
const relative = css`/index.css`; // generate class name for file contents
const absolute = css`https://example.com/index.css`; // generate class name for file contents

Both variations (static and dynamic) are sync and return a string in a format similar to csz-b60d61b8. If a ruleset is provided as a string then it is processed immediately but if a filepath is provided then processing is deferred until the contents of the file has been fetched and parsed.

NOTE: File paths starting with / must be relative to the current hostname, so if you are running your app on example.com and require /styles/index.css then csz will try fetch it from example.com/styles/index.css.

Styles imported from a file are inevitably going to take some amount of time to download. Whilst the stylesheet is being downloaded a temporary ruleset is applied to the element which hides it (using display: none) until the fetched files have been processed. This was implemented to prevent flashes of unstyled content.

See below for an example of what a raw ruleset might look like and how it looks like after processing.

Example stylesheet (unprocessed)

font-size: 2em;
 
// line comments 
/* block comments */
 
:global(body) {background:red}
 
h1 {
  h2 {
    h3 {
      content:'nesting'
    }
  }
}
 
@media (max-width: 600px) {
  & {display:none}
}
 
&:before {
  animation: slide 3s ease infinite
}
 
@keyframes slide {
  from { opacity: 0}
  to { opacity: 1}
}
 
& {
  display: flex
}
 
&::placeholder {
  color:red
}

Example stylesheet (processed)

  .csz-a4B7ccH9 {font-size: 2em;}
 
  body {background:red}
  h1 h2 h3 {content: 'nesting'}
 
  @media (max-width: 600px) {
    .csz-a4B7ccH9 {display:none}
  }
 
  .csz-a4B7ccH9:before {
    -webkit-animation: slide-id 3s ease infinite;
    animation: slide-id 3s ease infinite;
  }
 
 
  @-webkit-keyframes slide-id {
    from { opacity: 0}
    to { opacity: 1}
  }
  @keyframes slide-id {
    from { opacity: 0}
    to { opacity: 1}
  }
 
  .csz-a4B7ccH9 {
    display:-webkit-box;
    display:-webkit-flex;
    display:-ms-flexbox;
    display:flex;
  }
 
  .csz-a4B7ccH9::-webkit-input-placeholder {color:red;}
  .csz-a4B7ccH9::-moz-placeholder {color:red;}
  .csz-a4B7ccH9:-ms-input-placeholder {color:red;}
  .csz-a4B7ccH9::placeholder {color:red;}

Example

This library is framework agnostic but here is a contrived example of how you can style a React component conditionally based upon some state; demonstrating switching between static and dynamic styles on the fly.

import css from 'https://unpkg.com/csz';
 
export default () => {
  const [toggle, setToggle] = React.useState(false);
  return (
    <div
      className={toggle
        ? css`/index.css`
        : css`background: blue;`}
    >
      <h1>Hello World!</h1>
      <button onClick={e => setToggle(!toggle)}>Toggle</button>
    </div>
  );
};

Implementation

I was inspired by emotion and styled-components but unfortunately neither of these packages expose an es module compatible build and come with quite a lot of extraneous functionality that isn't required when the scope of the project is restricted to runtime only class name generation and ruleset isolation.