Motivation
Mono was born out of my own frustration.
Whilst working on different CSS codebases I realised all shared similar issues. A common trait became clear: CSS development is expensive - it's labour intensive & time consuming.
The typical CSS workflow amounted to:
- Hunting: Locate where a style derives from.
- Reasoning: Understand why a style exists.
- Analysing: Ascertain what impact adding / changing / removing a style will have.
- Friction: Compete with specificity, cascade & importance when making a change.
Four steps to make one change is exhausting, and more importantly not scalable. The bigger codebases grew the worse maintaining their CSS became.
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A cumbersome workflow isn't without reason, merely a symptom of other issues. CSS is notoriously fragile and difficult to reason with.
Part of the difficulties lie with global scope & an unhealthy tolerance of overrides. Without separation of concerns, nor a means to encapsulate we often find styles compete against one another - so much so that the term "winning style" has been coined.
Determining the "winning style" is unpredictable, with too many deciding factors at play. Global scope permits anyone to override. Influencers cascade, specificity and importance determine who is victorious. At any given time the victor can change (new styles added, old styles removed) which not only makes the outcome uncertain but fragile.
The unpredictable and fragile nature of CSS make it easy to break and hard to maintain. The sheer volume of styles cohabiting in the same space quickly grows unmanageable. It's difficult to keep track of what styles are used & who uses them. It grows increasingly difficult to identify dependencies and relationships between styles, which means we cannot confidently make changes.
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After having these problems myself & witnessing others suffering I thought there must be a better way! Initially a thought experiment mono evolved from investigating CSS issues, examining why they were problematic, & exploring how they were solved elsewhere.
With an open-minded approach & focus on understanding core problems before seeking solutions mono aims to make CSS robust, predictable, and easy to reason with. I'm extremely excited having watched mono mature & even more thrilled about its future!