I also really like CSS. Open the new application in your favourite editor. Browsing through shared React component in Bit.dev Set CSS Variables. Within this, I can place new CSS to override the original CSS. Helmet takes plain HTML … CSS Variables in a Gist . That means using universal technologies (JS, CSS, HTML), as oppose to library/framework-specific code (for example, ‘styled-components’ or even embedding you styling in your React components).That’s important for maintenance and scale.

The reasons for that go well beyond the scope of this post.Another reason would be to make your UI components as universal as possible. Now it's packaged into a resilient variable.It lets us be more explicit about why we're doing this. Having a typed theme object is nice, but I can't say that it's saved me a ton of time. Let's look at something more interesting…It looks pretty, but we get feedback that the click target is too small on mobile devices: industry guidelines are that interactive elements should be between We ship this change, and we sleep a little bit better knowing that we've improved the usability of our app.We quickly learn that our work isn't done, however. Up until lately, whenever we’d think of changing themes in run-time, we’d immediately go for some sort of a JS/JSX solution. You can specify a default value if the CSS variable isn't defined: var (--primary-color, pink) will fall back to pink if necessary. That could be either theming through higher-order components, passing themes as props (usually with the help of React.Context) or using popular libraries like styled-components.Today, thanks to ‘CSS custom properties’, a.k.a ‘CSS variables’, we shift the weight towards plain CSS. Themes Using CSS Variables and React Context. The syntax of the var() function is as follows: You do lose some static typing benefits—more on this later—but it's a very happy tradeoff in my eyes.This is a relatively minor difference, though. Whenever I do a React workshop with aspiring React developers, I show only one of these ways due to the limited time I have for the complete React workshop. In a React app Let's see what this looks like in React. You can use them for a lot of things, one of which is applying themes in your application with ease. Our components pick a size from the scale, and we There are some CSS properties that simply can't be animated. The variable name must begin with two dashes (--) and is case sensitive! We're giving it a name— There is chatter around letting users describe their own Despite these drawbacks, CSS variables open a lot of doors. This tutorial uses styled-componentsstyled-components, but the instructions should be relatively similar regardless of the CSS-in-JS library.

Being able to access theme values without an import or an inline function is a breath of fresh air. Variables in CSS should be declared within a CSS selector that defines its scope. It’s much easier to “translate” UI components from one technology stack to another when most of the styling is done using plain CSS. For a global scope you can use either the :root or the body selector.

You're writing CSS either way! React, react-dom, and react-scripts will be enough. To place the