Girouette

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Dès que les vents tourneront, nous nous en allerons.

Girouette is a grammar-based, generative approach to CSS. It translates a classname into a Garden data structure representing CSS.

(class-name->garden "w-10")
; => [".w-10" {:width "2.5rem"}]

Girouette also makes it easy to use your own grammar rules to generate anything you may dream of.

Introduction

CSS libraries like Tailwind and Tachyons provide quantities of predefined class names, hoping to cover most of the needs of their users. But because of combinatory explosion, they cannot provide all the class names users will ever need, in which case the users will have to hack their way with config files and/or handwritten CSS. When releasing for production, the unused CSS classes are removed from the CSS files using tools like PurgeCSS.

Girouette is taking the opposite approach where we first look at which class names are used, and from their names and a grammar associated with some generation rules, the corresponding CSS content is created.

This "on demand" generative approach allows to have any combination of parameters in a CSS class name, while opening the door to the most creative grammars which a human would want to use to communicate its intent.

(UPDATE: a couple of months after Girouette was released, the author of Tailwind implemented in its version 2 and 3 an "on demand" feature very similar to Girouette)

Documentation & Resources

Girouette supports all the classes available in Tailwind 2.0.2

Presentation @ the Bay Area Clojure Meetup:

• The slides
• Video recording

The project has example projects in example/:

• A simple demo project using Reagent.

How it works

Girouette is using the awesome Instaparse library for parsing the class names, and is converting them into the Garden format.

Its API mainly consists in the function class-name->garden which is pretty explicit.

(class-name->garden "w-42%")
;=> [".w-42\\%" {:width "42%"}]

You can use Girouette processor tool to extract the CSS class names from your source code and generate the CSS in real time as you develop.

See the demo project for more information.

Advantages of this approach

With the right Girouette components in place, any parameters can be combined in class names without leaving your usual REPL workflow.

Large range on numbers

No need to stop what you are doing and to modify some config files just because mx-13 is not supported by default while mx-12 is.

Any color can be represented directly in class names, like rgba-f59d or rgba-ff5599dd.

Limitless class name descriptiveness

It is possible to create grammars which support very long class names.

;; Example of class name:
"bg-gradient-to-right-red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple"

;; Instaparse rule:
"bg-gradient = <'bg-gradient-to-'> gradient-direction (<'-'> color)+
 gradient-direction = 'top' | 'right' | 'bottom' | 'left' | angle
 color = ...
 "

Link to other CSS projects

In Clojure

A few other alternatives are available.

• Tailwind Garden
• macrocss
• tailwind-hiccup
• tailwind-clj

In JS

Atomizer

Atomizer is an older project which is also interpreting CSS class names.

WindiCSS

Independently and in parallel of Girouette's development, WindiCSS was developed with similar ideas. Please check it out, specially if you are developing directly in the JS environment.

Who is using Girouette

• The Ornament library, by Lambda Island / Gaiwan: A very elegant way to craft and integrate CSS rules inside your Clojure(script) apps.

(To add your project to this list, just edit this file and open a pull request)

Contribute

Contributions are very welcome, just make sure that the contributions are your own, and add proper credits in the commit messages if it is not the case.

License terms

This project is distributed under the MIT License, which is available at https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Copyright (c) Vincent Cantin and contributors.