Vanilla CSS is all you need
Vanilla CSS is all you need
This article from zolkos.com explores how 37signals builds complex web applications using only vanilla CSS, avoiding preprocessors and build tools. It delves into the evolution of their CSS architecture across products like Campfire, Writebook, and Fizzy, showcasing their adoption of modern CSS features such as custom properties, native nesting, container queries, the :has() selector, and CSS Layers. The author argues that modern CSS is powerful enough to simplify front-end development, challenging the common reliance on utility-first frameworks like Tailwind for certain projects.
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it's fun to see some love thrown at modern web standards that have evolved to supplant the many build tools that filled the gaps of slower moving standards.
with that said, build tooling still is a powerful force for modern web apps that leverage the compile step to eek out performance, compatibility and more.
fragile and complex tooling that lacked support, intuition, readabiltity and maintainability are the ones that are worth pulling out.
I enjoyed the circled example and learning about @starting-style
in fact, my favorite web tooling are those that help you learn and leverage modern web standards: ides, lsp, forward polly-folls etc etc
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