Tinsel

Tinsel is a slim API written in ES6 that creates styled React components. Partially inspired by React Native Stylesheets.

Pass styles in a string or an object (or a function that returns a string or object, given a context and optionally a theme), and easily wrap your components with the output.

Quick peek

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { connectStyle } from 'tinsel';
 
class MyComponent extends Component {
  render () {
    const { styledProps: styled } = this.props;
    return (
      <section {...styled.container}>
        <h1 {...styled.title}>Welcome!</h1>
      </section>
    )
  }
}
 
const wrapped = connectStyle(context => `
  container {
    font-size: 4rem;
    // No need for @media tags when you can build output based on your own conditions.
    ${context.widerThan(768) ? 'max-width: 100%;' : ''}
  }
 
  title {
    color: ${context.is('title',':hover') ? 'red' : 'white'};
  }
`);
 
export default wrapped(MyComponent);

An event-listener loop informs the context, which you can use to create powerful hover effects and responsive styles, without using traditional CSS means. All function-generated styles are re-calculated and passed down as props to your component, so you can achieve even more powerful effects with simpler syntax than SASS or LESS.

Some quick points:

• context.is(selector, condition) uses the native & super-fast '.matches' DOM element API under the hood.
• connectStyle() returns a component-wrapper function that passes down the following objects, keyed by your own-determined selectors, that you can easily spread to your component children.
  • styles: where each value is a set of inline-styles ready to be applied.
  • styledRefs: where each value is a function that adopts an element's ref and uses it to determine whether an element is being hovered, or is active, etc.
  • styledRefWrappers: where each value is a function that adopts the element's ref and passes the ref to a function given as an argument. For instance:

<h2 ref={styledRefWrappers.subtitle(myOtherRefHandler)}>Subtitle</h2>

• styledProps: where each value is that selector's style and styledRef properties, in an easy-to-spread object.

For instance, you can manually apply the styles.title as style={styles.title} to your title element, or use <h1 {...styledProps.title}> to automatically apply both style and ref props.

Why include ref props?

AKA why do you need DOM Node references to generate CSS?

Tinsel generates only inline-styles. However, in today's world, pseudo-classes and responsive styling are a must. When you declare your styles, you can get special selector effects and responsive styles by using the context argument API to generate output with the same specificity you'd get from any traditional stylesheet. In order to ascertain :hover and :active and :visited pseudo-classes, we need a DOM node to watch over to know when to trigger style changes. The ref prop provides tinsel the DOM node to check against.

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(More readme coming soon! Feel free to bother me to do so.) —AB