A New Day, A New “CSS” Thing

So there’s this new CSS thing called Stylify which is getting people hot under the collar again. It’s been a while since a white dude re-invented CSS, so it’s been a long time coming.

I’m actually not really that fussed about it. Yeh it’s weird writing CSS rules in classes, but whatever. I don’t really know what problem it’s solving, but the author must have felt like there was a reason for it in whatever type of projects they work on.

What is refreshing about this, is (as far as I can tell), the author isn’t saying CSS is bad. Quite the contrary, where they (I think) are insinuating that frameworks are not great, which I’m on board with. What isn’t refreshing is the wall-to-wall dudes giving testimonials, but I guess this sorta thing attracts dudes like a pot of jam attracts wasps.

I guess the point I’m making with this post is Stylify is just another thing. Whatever works for you is right because it works, so I wouldn’t get too upset about it, personally. What gets me upset is when I get tagged in Tweets with “I bet Andy hates this”, looking for some sort of hot take (which so far hasn’t happened thankfully).

Also, I despise when framework authors make absurd claims, like the Tailwind dude does, claiming that “best practices don’t actually work”, when really what he’s trying to do is, I guess, create a case for making money, which must be getting harder with the year-on-year dwindling interest of their framework. Again, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Stylify.

I’m going to probably ignore Stylify. I don’t have any problems writing CSS and I’m certainly not the target. What I would say is before jumping into using it, consider what your Stylify project would look like 6 months, a year, two years down the line. Is it going to be a nightmare to maintain?

In closing: use it or don’t: you only live once.


👋 Hello, I’m Andy and this is my little home on the web.

I’m the founder of Set Studio, a creative agency that specialises in building stunning websites that work for everyone and Piccalilli, a publication that will level you up as a front-end developer.


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