Learning React and Gatsby by building a blog

[SIGSTART]

@FarligOpptreden

React is only concerned with handling how markup is rendered and interacted with in the browser.

On that point… something else I’d like to check out at some stage is making the markup generated more semantic. One thing I really appreciated about Jekyll is that you can really hand-craft the HTML. The trade-off is that you don’t get that single page app feel that frameworks like React give you.

@FarligOpptreden

I’ve used both SASS and LESS with React and you only need to install the necessary dependencies and configure them with a bundler / transpiler like Webpack.

Sweet! I think Gatsby already uses Webpack (or at least something like it)… I’ll look into it.

@FarligOpptreden

You have the option of writing “JSS” in your JSX (the “markup” language of React), which is a fancy term for styling injected into the elements themselves. But this voids the decades old best practice of separation of concerns, so I stick to good old stylesheets (using SASS).

This was what the tutorial I was following used (JSS), and your conclusion was my intuition as well.

A tremendous amount of work has also gone into frameworks like Bourbon, Foundation, and Bootstrap. I remember how impressed I was with Foundation the first time I tried it — great typography with an import.

@FarligOpptreden

I did investigate complex responsive layouts at some point using JSS, but many scenarios couldn’t intuitively be handled using it and the effort didn’t seem worth ditching CSS.

Thank you, this is very good to know. I’ll definitely look into using a proper Sass framework.