React-bender NPM

Bender is the only unified way to define and apply styles to your React components using React DOM structure.

Install

yarn add react-bender

What is React Bender?

There are a lot of different approaches exists in the community for styling React components, but there was no unified approach for both* React (for Web) and React Native hence we invented this powerful library!

We all know that the CSS has lots of problems at scale. Here @vjeux already explained the problems mentioned years ago. Today, all the best practices and 3rd party libraries encouraging mostly CSS-in-JS approach. (Please refer to here.)

But conversely, Bender aims to use CSS practices to React and YES! This is yet another styling approach but not in CSS-in-JS way.

Motivation

Bender introduces the CSS-ish way of defining style rules for React components. Of course, does not inherit problems of CSS into the React world but trying to bring some of the good stuff that you experienced from CSS.

Why CSS-ish way of definition?

As mentioned above, the CSS already exists in the browser environment but exist with its problems. Open Source Community trying to bring some practices like; css-modules, styled-components to avoid these issues but all these efforts are not addressing all the problems. A small summary can be found here.

On the other hand, CSS does not exist on the React Native and it has a strict way of defining styles and styling components. Yes, it doesn't have any special language or syntax. You just style you components using plain-old JavaScript.

Most of the time component styles are defined as a static variable along with the component itself. This makes it easy to build self-contained components that always look and behave the same way. At the same time, it complicates building customizable and themable components that could have multiple alternative styles which could be customized without changing the component’s source code.

Bender using its own markup to bring a new approach to React component styling. With Bender you can write your components and their styles once and use them on both React & React Native projects.

Approach

Bender has its own markup but if you are familiar with CSS or SCSS kind of supersets, it makes your job easy. Because you will feel like you are using something you already know.

Bender's main idea is to create set of targeted styles based on components and enhance them with additional alternative style combinations if needed.

Component Specific Styles

You can create component styles using #ComponentName keyword in Bender stylesheet. Attached component name must start with #, must be unique in the stylesheet file and has to be defined as PascalCase.

Component styles can contain style definitions with kebab-case. These definitions will be default style properties of the matching component. But additionally, alternative styles can be defined as described in the next section.

Here's the basic style definition for a component named Text.

#Text {
	font-size: 14px;
	color: 'black';
}

Please note that Bender !== CSS but, Bender == CSS. It doesn't have the same CSS features, rules and selectors but uses CSS syntax to define styles.

After defining your component styles you should attach this definition to desired React component using withBenderStyles HoC.

// Text.js
import { Text as RNText } from 'react-native';
import { withBenderStyles } from 'react-bender';

export const Text = withBenderStyles('Text')(RNText)

This method will enrich your component and gather definitions named as Text inside your stylesheet then pass as style property automatically.

Final component can be used as the example below.

<Text>Hey! This is a sample text inside a bender styled component.</Text>

Alternative Styles

Alternative styles are the coolest way to add additional style flavours to your components using styleName property of your target react component.

#Text {
	font-size: 14px;
	color: 'black';
	
	// Alternate 1
	.bold {
		font-weight: 'bold';
	}
	
	// Alternate 2
	.underline {
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
}

These style definitions must always be wrapped with a component style definition.

Alternate style definitions must be start with . and can contain nested alternative styles. Also, Bender has style cascading and nesting support. You can define a specific alternate rule to apply when you nest your components using React DOM.

There are two different ways to specify alternative styles to a Bender styled component.

First option would be passing desired alternate definition name into the styleName prop of your React component.

<Text styleName="bold">Hey! This is a inside a bender styled component.</Text>

If you are nesting your components, nested component will inherit styles resolved by super's styleName props. At the example; you should see the whole as bold and just sample text section bold and italic styled.

<Text styleName="bold">Hey! This is a <Text styleName="italic">sample text</Text> inside a bender styled component.</Text>

styleName property can be a string or array of strings. If you want to pass multiple modifiers into a component, you can use array approach or use string with spaces between each modifier style names.

Rules Specificity

Specificity is basically a measure of how specific a rule definition is.

The amount of specificity a rule has is measured using four different values, which can be thought of as thousands, hundreds, tens and ones — four single digits in four columns: