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?
