Captured the text here so we don't lose it in the email streams: https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/wiki/Styling-Improvements
a Andrew Wetmore Assistant VP, Marketing and Publicity, The ASF <https://apache.org> Editor-Writer, Infra team, The ASF Editor, moosehousepress.com On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 12:32 PM Josh Tynjala <[email protected]> wrote: > Did you mean to post this to the Royale dev list? > > -- > Josh Tynjala > Bowler Hat LLC > https://bowlerhat.dev/ > > > On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 7:54 AM Gabe Harbs <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to improve styling > > capabilities in Royale. I have some ideas and I wanted to get others’ > > thoughts. > > > > Styling HTML is probably one of the big pain points. > > > > Tailwind CSS has solved the problem very nicely, but there’s some > problems > > with Tailwind: > > > > 1. Getting the Tailwind CSS generated for a Royale app. Tailwind is built > > to read HTML, find the classes and populate CSS at build time. That > doesn’t > > fit perfectly with the Royale build process. > > 2. You need to “know” Tailwind to specify the utilities. There’s no easy > > way to get code completion in MXML etc. > > 3. It doesn’t mesh perfectly with the Royale architecture of getting > > functionality and styling. > > > > I was thinking: > > > > The big advantage of Tailwind is that it makes it very easy to compose > CSS > > functionality using a lot of small utility classes and only the classes > > used will be used in the end result. > > > > We have a very similar concept in Royale: Beads. > > > > That set me thinking about how we can accomplish the same thing in Royale > > and here’s what I’m thinking: > > > > - I want to create a new component set (I’m thinking of calling it > “Style” > > which would have a large set of styling beads. > > - Each bead would encapsulate a specific function in CSS. > > - We already have the ability to add CSS classes dynamically > > - There would be a global utility class lookup > > - Each time a utility class (in a bead) is applied, the class will be > > checked against the lookup and dynamically added if it doesn’t exist. > > - There would be a standard naming convention for the classes so each > > utility which does a specific thing would be created exactly once. > > > > The end result would be that all the CSS would be completely dynamic and > > would not be needed to be added to statically loaded CSS files. > > - The actual code for creating the CSS should be quite concise and barely > > add weight to the app. > > - I have no done profiling on dynamically added CSS stylesheets, but I > > think it’s very performant. > > - CSS would be lazy loading which could further improve load times. > > - It should certainly add less weight than constantly declaring inline > > styling as is currently very common. > > - Using stylesheets might be more performant. (Not sure about that.) > > - Using stylesheets give much more flexibility for styling > > - It addresses pain points like hover behavior. > > > > Thoughts? >
