Run-time styling just got better

Overview

On 2016-04-17 we released version 1.1 of the MIT licensed PowerCSS JavaScript library. PowerCSS provides many of the features of Stylus, {less}, or Sass but with JavaScript-powered run-time styling. It could make your static CSS files obsolete. Installation couldn’t be easier thanks to npm: npm install powercss.

We have seen over 1,500 npm downloads on the busiest days, and it often exceeds 500. It looks like word is getting out about PowerCSS. We are currently using it as a theme engine for a commercial web application with great success.

Recent changes

We bumped the version to 1.1 because there was a significant API addition: support for arbitrary-depth nested conditional expressions. However, the API remains almost completely backward compatible with version 1.0. Media queries are now easily created and automatically optimized. We added numerous regression tests to check this capability, and currently have 106 assertions, which you can check like so:

npm install powercss
cd node_modules/powercss
npm install # dev dependencies
npm test

The future

We still want per-cascade double-buffered stylesheets so that each feature module can cleanly control its own styling. That feature is now is slated for version 1.2.

What would you like to see in PowerCSS? Send me a note, file an issue, or send a pull request at our GitHub repository. Constructive feedback, questions, and collaborators are always welcome!

Cheers, Mike