February 16, 2015
One thing that's always bothered me is how we create so much software using markup. I understand how markup can be useful, but it always bothers me when your markup language does not contain a turing-complete language as well!
CSS has always bothered me. There seem to be so many problem with it, and I don't understand why people don't move on to a constraint-based layout system like Apple has done for iPhone.
To aleviate the pain, people have created CSS preprocessors like LESS, SCSS, Stylus, etc., but these are mere bandaids. While I can't say I have the best solution, I created a package that I believe is a step in the right direction.
This package was fun to make for a few reasons. It let me exercise my functional programming skills creating an API much like lodash creating a powerful library in only a few hundred lines of code. I've also always thought it would be really cool to have an app with a rotating color scheme. This package allows you to define CSS rules in JavaScript or Coffeescript and is "Tracker aware", meaning you can define CSS rules with functions and any reactive variables within that function will reactively update the appropriate CSS rule.
While this isn't necessarily recommended for performance, it allows for some interesting concepts. For example, you can reactively update your color scheme, or the entire layout based on the window size. Most of all, you get all the powers of abstraction from your favorite programming language to define your CSS rules! Let me know what you think!