proposal: deprecate CSS components in favour of 3rd party CSS pre-processors

[a-h]

templ css CSS components are very basic. They don't support a range of use cases #262 including media queries, and the interpolation features are minimal. I have built a PoC of interpolating CSS values within a standard <style> element at https://github.com/a-h/templ-css but before jumping to implementation, I took a step back.

People are already using pre-processors

Many users of templ are using Tailwind, or other CSS pre-processors already. They are essentially templating libraries for CSS, but can also do thing like include browser specific properties.

Pre-processors are popular and mature

The PostCSS NPM package gets around 69.3 million downloads per week, while SASS gets around 13.5 million per week, and tailwind gets 8M. They're well established projects, with large user bases.

templ css features are covered by existing pre-processors

templ css was designed so that it was possible to include classes for specific templ components, and only render the CSS if required. It dynamically generates class names to provide basic scoping. But... its design has severe limits.

Given the range of available pre-processors, their popularity, and the limited resources of the templ project, I think it might be better to spend time on improving the DX around using existing pre-processors in templ, rather than to attempt to create one, alongside everything else.

PostCSS has a plugin for scoping at https://github.com/madyankin/postcss-modules - which allows the scoping behaviour to be achieved easily, and there's a plugin for PostCSS which outputs a list of classes - https://www.npmjs.com/package/postcss-ts-classnames - in that particular case, in TypeScript format.

We can get compile-time errors about missing CSS classes

If, for example, we created a version of postcss-ts-classnames PostCSS plugin which created a Go package called class containing a load of constants, we'd then be able to import the package into our templates, and get a strongly defined list of classes. When you write <div class={ class. in templ, the Go LSP would provide a list of classes in the IDE autocomplete.

This would give us the benefits of a strongly typed list of classes, for minimal development effort.

This proposal fits well with #739

For JavaScript handling, I've proposed an alternative focus on to using JSON script elements, alongside esbuild to bundle up scripts. It solves the problems of transpiling TypeScript so you can use async/await, sorts out minification etc. you can see what that looks like at https://github.com/a-h/templ/issues/739 - esbuild is written in Go, and is very fast.

templ.OncePerRequest

To ensure that links to stylesheets, or <style> content itself is only rendered once, a new templ.OncePerRequest component could ensure that children of the component are only rendered once per request, using the ctx parameter.

Build process

I think the way forward on CSS is similar - with the result that you run templ generate to get your HTML templates, esbuild to covert your modern JS/TS to browser JS, and postcss (or whatever CSS pre-processor you want to use) to get output CSS, and get the Go web server to host the outputs at dist/public.

Automatic (opt-in) migration for users of templ css and templ script components

There could be an automated migration path away from templ css and templ script. A templ migrate command could bring all the CSS together and output scss file(s) instead, while the scripts would be converted into JS functions in a *.js file.

Consideration of project setup

These tools require a more complex setup in that you have to have node installed, and will need an esbuild config mjs file, a package.json and a postcss config, but I think that can be solved by using a tool like cookiecutter (but not cookiecutter) to create some initial app templates, e.g. basic templ hello world, templ, HTMX with typescript and postcss, or templ, HTMX with JS, tailwind etc.

style attribute

Currently, the style attribute can't contain templ expressions. I think this could be relaxed, and any CSS within the style attribute could be pushed through a CSS sanitization process. This would allow the use of style={ fmt.Sprintf("background-image: url(%v)", url) } or the use of a dynamic builder (not implemented, just an example) style={ css.BackgroundImage(url).PaddingPx(10, 10, 10, 10) }.

Summary

I think this would be a smart use of time, and would allow us to spend more time on the LSP and DX areas of templ.

Thoughts?

[jimafisk]

These tools require a more complex setup in that you have to have node installed, and will need an esbuild config mjs file, a package.json and a postcss config

For me personally, this is something I'd really like to avoid. The main reason I picked Templ over Svelte for my new app was to avoid the JS ecosystem. I'd prefer a built-in solution, even if it had less features, but of course I understand the constraints on developer time and know you have a lot of competing priorities. Templ is awesome overall, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us in real-time!

[bastianwegge]

I agree with the proposal, as I don't think CSS should be a scope for templ at all. I would also like to opt out of the JS ecosystem (@jimafisk ) but I think it's almost impossible right now.

We migrated a medium sized go+react project completely to templ. As we swapped away from React components, we also needed interactivity. We looked into web-components, especially things like stencil or lit but this would ultimately bring back JS dependencies and build processes back into the project. We ended up using HTMX + Alpine.js which is an awesome combination that really drives the idea of locality of behavior and HATEOAS, but it definitely is not a silver-bullet and I'd be open to better solutions.

[zoop-btc]

I started building with templ precisely because I don't want to setup JS tooling. Integrating with them is fine as long as it's optional.

[stuartaccent]

im not advertising what ive done just a mere food for thought. Im using temple and very quickly found I needed more than the css provided so started our own way of generating css from go. very early days and still working out the best way to use it and what we need from it.

https://github.com/AccentDesign/gcss

[a-h]

I love what you're doing there @stuartaccent.

Couple of ideas (not sure if you've already of thought of this)...

If you wanted to, you could update the gcss.Style type to have a Render method.

func (s *Style) Render(ctx context.Context, w io.Writer) error {
  //TODO: Get a CSP nonce from the context.
  //TODO: Check errors etc.
  io.WriteString(w, "<style type=\"text/css\">\n")
  s.CSS(w)
  io.WriteString(w, "\n</style>")
}

func (s *Style) CSS(w io.Writer) error {
  // Existing
}

You could also create a gcss.Stylesheet type which is an alias of []Style, and add the Render method to that too.

type Stylesheet []Style

func (ss Stylesheet) Render(ctx context.Context, w io.Writer) error {
  //TODO: Get a CSP nonce from the context.
  //TODO: Check errors etc.
  io.WriteString(w, "<style type=\"text/css\">\n")
  for _, s := range ss {
    s.CSS(w)
  }
  io.WriteString(w, "\n</style>")
}

Doing this would mean that gcss.Style and gcss.Stylesheet both implement templ.Component and you can drop styles into components. Combined with the new templ.Once function (https://github.com/a-h/templ/pull/750), you'd be able to have CSS that's only loaded once per HTTP request.

So, defining a set of styles as a templ.Component that's only rendered once per HTTP request.

package deps

var buttonStyles = gcss.StyleSheet{
    {
        Selector: ".button",
        Props: gcss.Props{
            AlignItems:     props.AlignItemsCenter,
            BorderRadius:   radius,
            Display:        props.DisplayInlineFlex,
            FontSize:       fontMd,
            FontWeight:     props.FontWeightMedium,
            Height:         spacing10,
            JustifyContent: props.JustifyContentCenter,
            LineHeight:     leadingTight,
            PaddingTop:     spacing2,
            PaddingRight:   spacing4,
            PaddingBottom:  spacing2,
            PaddingLeft:    spacing4,
        },
    },
    // More...
}

var buttonStylesHandle = templ.NewOnceHandle()

templ ButtonCSS(ctx context.Context, w io.Writer) (err error) {
  @buttonStylesHandle.Once() {
    @buttonStyles()
  }
}

Then, using those CSS classes as components in templ:

package components

templ Button(name string) {
  @deps.ButtonCSS
  <button class="button">{name}</button>
}

templ ButtonPrimary(name string) {
  @deps.ButtonCSS
  <button class="button-primary">{name}</button>
}

If you then use Button and ButtonPrimary on a page (bad API design, I know, it's just as an example - https://gopress.io/ uses a struct for attrs which is likely more appropriate here).

But, in this case the CSS would only be loaded into the page as a <style> element if required by the component.

Obviously, I'm not aware of gcss, so maybe you've already discounted these ideas. 😁

Either way, it looks very great.

[stuartaccent]

thanks, @a-h that looks like a solid idea i will take a look.

cheers stu.

[Riu]

As a Gopress creator, all I can say is - CSS in template engines is a huge topic. It is important to answer the questions: what architecture are we creating for, where and how will we embed styles, what do we want to share/reuse or what should be global, how will we introduce changes (e.g. after changing from the UI designer in Figma). Some challenges:

• if you have inline css then there will be problem with global changes;
• if you put styles in files you need to serve only what you use;
• if you are rendering mail templates maybe you need pure inline css;
• if you have got microfrontends/htmx architecture, then the number of challenges doubles;
• if you would like to make library components like we have in FE frameworks (scoped styles), you should not render <style>css code</style> every time you render arrays of components;
• much, much more...

Gopress has a very unique approach in that we have sets of Tailwind classes that are transferred one-to-one from Golang to, for example, Vue, because we use an atomic design approach. These sets create variants based on attributes. Instead of classes you can use just pure css (it will be worse DX, but the effect can be more or less the same). DX is very important - you can see immediately what styles the class gives (syntax suggestions from Tailwind). The component is isolated and the only dependency is the Tailwind configuration file.

Because Tailwind is also not perfect i'm working on alternative solution (without Tailwind) and one more thing - by design, Gopress was built in such a way that components could be generated and changed from an application designed for this purpose. This is related, on the one hand, to AI and, on the other hand, to the problem of technology adoption.

Gcss is interesting because it has no dependency and in some cases it can be good solution, definitely worth attention.

[gamebox]

style attribute Currently, the style attribute can't contain templ expressions. I think this could be relaxed, and any CSS within the style attribute could be pushed through a CSS sanitization process. This would allow the use of style={ fmt.Sprintf("background-image: url(%v)", url) } or the use of a dynamic builder (not implemented, just an example) style={ css.BackgroundImage(url).PaddingPx(10, 10, 10, 10) }.

This is very much needed. I am trying to use Templ for HTML Emails, and am finding that this undocumented restriction on style elements is very much a roadblock to success. Even in 2024, inline style blocks still do not have the necessary email client support to allow me to use them, so the existing CSS tooling in Templ falls short for me there. And to your point, if they worked I'd be doing something with Tailwind to do this anyway as that is my normal workflow for web page HTML.

I think that not baking this in from the start - or at the absolute minimum, documenting it - was a mistake. I know that the design philosophy behind Templ is to be helpful, sometimes erring on the side of being "hand holdy", but these sorts of seemingly arbitrary restrictions can lead to a lot of disillusionment from developers just trying to ship product.

Oh, and one last thing I'll mention is I agree with @jimafisk that I too do everything I can to avoid having a package.json in my application. I vendor HTMX, and only work with the tailwindcss executable.

For context

This is all I want to be able to do in an HTML Email. I want to keep my color scheme and theme information the same so I want to use some consts to do so in inline styles:

templ emailLayout() {
    <!-- Don't worry about the rest -->
    <body style={ "margin:0; padding:0; background-color:"+common.BackgroundColor+";" }>
    <!-- Don't worry about the rest -->
}

One very last thing...

I have a similar issue with the <!DOCTYPE> tag, there is a much more expressive grammar allowed inside of that tag than what Templ allows for, and not utilizing it can cause compatibility concerns with Emails. I can understand that you may not care to support HTML Email authoring in Templ - but it's a big and important use case for web services, so you should at least consider that use case.

[zyriab]

I think keeping a minimal in-house solution and allowing the user to plug in something else if they want is a good approach.

[joerdav]

@a-h I think we are circling a decision here. It may be worth us splitting this into a few different features...

• Allow dynamic style attributes
• Document recommended approaches going forward
• Add a generate warning for use of css/script components
• Create migration that converts css/script components to use script/style tags
• Remove script/css components

[cevdetardaharan]

In my opinion, using build system should be optional but even when we use templ, we have a build step that generates go files. So what we can do is getting the best solution (performance and compability) into the build system in order to achieve faster builds and better developer experience.

My suggestion would be using lightningcss[repo].

[matthewmueller]

Just started playing around with Templ today. Really great project! This was one of the first questions I bumped up against, "how do I style more than one element at a time?"

I'd really like Templ to provide a native solution, similar to how Next.js supports styled-jsx as an out-of-the-box CSS solution, but you can supplement with Tailwind, etc.

I'm still new to Templ so I'm not quite sure about solutions yet, but I maintain https://github.com/matthewmueller/css and https://github.com/matthewmueller/styledjsx, which is basically styled-jsx but in pure Go. Something like this coupled with ESBuild's CSS support for browserlist, I do feel like we have all the pieces built out in the Go ecosystem.

[a-h]

Interesting! @matthewmueller - we should probably get together and chat about it, if you're interested in chasing down an implementation.

I have an example of using tdewolff's parser to add in support for interpolated variables, see https://github.com/a-h/templ-css/blob/7cb95993e63562ff6aa2c84f69feb1a9ff51dd68/parse_test.go#L29-L40

Perhaps there's a way to use your css parser and do something similar? The steps would be something like:

• Parse CSS and interpolated variables into a tree of nodes (AST)
• Ensure the AST can write itself back out (that's how the templ fmt command works), but formatted so that CSS is auto-formatted by templ
• Write a generator that takes those nodes and writes out the runtime Go code for rendering the static and interpolated values
• Update syntax highlighting patterns to include support for the new syntax

[matthewmueller]

Definitely down to chat more about the design! But here's some initial thoughts:

I have an example of using tdewolff's parser to add in support for interpolated variables, see https://github.com/a-h/templ-css/blob/7cb95993e63562ff6aa2c84f69feb1a9ff51dd68/parse_test.go#L29-L40

I just tested this in this commit. So {{red}} doesn't parse because it's invalid CSS, but I did provide a couple options that are also valid CSS in that commit.

Would you be open to different syntax? We could also do something custom for Templ if {red} would be best.

Ensure the AST can write itself back out (that's how the templ fmt command works), but formatted so that CSS is auto-formatted by templ

This is possible today. After you manipulate the AST, you can print it back out via stylesheet.String() (code). I'd imagine we could store the ast.Stylesheet within Templ's AST.

Write a generator that takes those nodes and writes out the runtime Go code for rendering the static and interpolated values

This should also be possible, you could even translate from a CSS AST to a Go AST, then print out the Go AST.

---

Stepping back a sec, one of the big challenges in the component world is making sure styles from the parents don't leak into the child components. Unfortunately nested CSS doesn't help with this:

.parent {
  a {
    background: red;
  }
}

<div class="parent">
  @Child()
</div>

<div class="child">
  <a>some link</a> <!-- oh noz, I'm red -->
</div>

Personally, I'd love for Templ to take care of this issue for us.

---

Spitballing on solutions, I think what I'd like to see is a remix on:

handler := NewCSSMiddleware(httpRoutes, c1)

But instead of middleware taking classes one-by-one, it's a handler that takes a filesystem, something like:

//go:embed view/**/*.templ
var fsys embed.FS

router.Get("/templ.css", templ.Stylesheet(fsys))

Then upon request, it traverses the .templ files, looking for styles, gathers them, dedupes them and bundle them all together. In production, you'd cache this sheet, run the output through esbuild adding vendor prefixes and minifying.

You'd need to transform the .templ files themselves with a hashed class name of the CSS, maybe in the presence of <style scoped>, it appends a css-[hash] onto each HTML element in the generated output:

Before transform

templ Story(story *hackernews.Story) {
  <div class="story">
    <div>
      <a>
        { story.Title }
      </a>
      if story.URL  != "" {
        <a class="url" href={ templ.URL(story.URL) }>({ formatURL(story.URL) })</a>
      }
    </div>
    <div class="meta">
      { strconv.Itoa(story.Points) } points by { story.Author } • { " " }
      @Time(story.CreatedAt)
    </div>
    <style scoped>
      .story {
        background: red;
      }
      .url {
        text-transform: none;
      }
      .meta {
        padding: 10px;
      }
    </style>
  </div>
}

After transform

templ Story(story *hackernews.Story) {
  <div class="css-123abc story">
    <div class="css-123abc">
      <a class="css-123abc">
        { story.Title }
      </a>
      if story.URL  != "" {
        <a class="css-123abc url" href={ templ.URL(story.URL) }>({ formatURL(story.URL) })</a>
      }
    </div>
    <div class="css-123abc meta">
      { strconv.Itoa(story.Points) } points by { story.Author } • { " " }
      @Time(story.CreatedAt)
    </div>
  </div>
}

Then the served CSS ends up being something like:

.css-123abc.story {
  background: red;
}
.css-123abc.url {
  text-transform: none;
}
.css-123abc.meta {
  padding: 10px;
}

Sorry, this ended up being longer than I expected. Hope this helps! Also happy to sync on this. Thanks for entertaining the idea of having batteries-included CSS in Templ!

Update So for fun I stuck the component above into https://github.com/matthewmueller/styledjsx and it mostly works! Here's the draft PR: https://github.com/matthewmueller/styledjsx/pull/1. If there's interest, I'll look into making styledjsx work with Templ and then I'd just need some help figuring out the integration point with Templ.

[a-h]

This is very interesting, and your demo looks great!

I'm keen to have a scoped CSS capability in the templ ecosystem to meet exactly the challenge you described - the ability to ship components that are not affected by inheriting scope.

templ has a parser in it, you can parse a templ file into nodes using the https://github.com/a-h/templ/blob/3ac3c9de53ad81f43d70bebfb642a89c2c69a4c1/parser/v2/templatefile.go#L13 function, then it's possible to walk the nodes using a function like https://github.com/a-h/templ/blob/3ac3c9de53ad81f43d70bebfb642a89c2c69a4c1/parser/v2/diagnostics.go#L15-L33 which is used for producing warning diagnostics.

This capability doesn't have to be within templ itself, but great if it is.

In terms of syntax, I'm flexible on what that could / should look like.

What I'm hearing from templ users is that they want to be able to:

• Use Go values in CSS values: color: { colorVariable }
• Use Go values in partial values: background: 1px { lineType } { color }
• Merge key/values / CSS from the Go side into the client-side CSS
• Use conditionals etc.
• Use media queries etc.

I'm really keen that templ should nudge users towards security - i.e. make it harder to do the wrong thing, e.g. templ's existing CSS components protect against unsafe CSS property values.

I'm also keen that it's something we can maintain with a small number of people over a long period of time. I'd like to be conservative in features - not box ourselves in, but give ourselves scope to add features later.

Are you on the Gopher's Slack? If so, should we schedule a Slack call and kick about some ideas? Ideally, we'd end up with a proposal doc that outlines the target features, the expected syntax, and the expected output Go code.

[Riu]

Please, remember about few things:

• if you want make scoped block with css, it should/can be outside any html tag;
• you can't optimize the size of the final css code - it will be problem in large projects(large number of components);
• you need care about potential name conflicts if you would like render microfrontends;
• what about global variables, "reset" file, etc?
• what about many variants, with many values ​​for making themes?

[a-h]

Would you be up for joining a conversation about this topic @Riu? Your real-time input would be very valued.

[matthewmueller]

@a-h Awesome!

What I'm hearing from templ users is that they want to be able to:

Great to hear this is coming from user feedback! At the risk of going against this feedback, I'm on the fence about interpolation within CSS for two reasons:

1. The {interpolation} syntax requires extending a CSS parser. https://github.com/matthewmueller/css is not 100% complete. It parses some most big CSS frameworks, but it's definitely not battle-tested. I can definitely commit to fixing bugs and addressing missing features, but it'd be nice to stick with standards in case a more robust CSS parser comes along. Svelte had some similar discussions around this topic: https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/758#issuecomment-321039837. This concern certainly goes away if we go with something like var(interpolation).

2. Toggling classes might be good enough. Typically when you want dynamic CSS, you're swapping between a known set of values (e.g. light, dark theme). That's doable today with <div class={"container " + templ.KV("dark", isDark)}>. In the rare cases when you want a fully dynamic value, you can do <div style={"background-color: " + color}>. I believe this is where we'd need the safe CSS sanitation.

So my personal opinion is that this is a reasonable place to be conservative on features. At the very least for the initial release.

This capability doesn't have to be within templ itself, but great if it is.

Cool, I was just learning more about Templ these last couple days. I'll look into contributing next!

I'm also keen that it's something we can maintain with a small number of people over a long period of time. I'd like to be conservative in features - not box ourselves in, but give ourselves scope to add features later.

Big fan of this approach!

Are you on the Gopher's Slack? If so, should we schedule a Slack call and kick about some ideas? Ideally, we'd end up with a proposal doc that outlines the target features, the expected syntax, and the expected output Go code.

Yep! Just dropped a message and will drop follow-up questions when I start the implementation. Also down to sync. I'm free most evenings (US timezone) and weekends.

---

@Riu thanks for the call outs. +1 it would be good to learn more about these. Let me try and answer a few:

if you want make scoped block with css, it should/can be outside any html tag;

I'm really curious about this. Since the scoping applies to the HTML, I'm unsure why you'd want to support scoped block outside of any HTML tag.

you can't optimize the size of the final css code - it will be problem in large projects(large number of components);

This is mostly true. Since you're hashing the CSS contents, you can dedupe