Head-to-Head: Emotion vs Material Design Lite Analysis
@emotion/css
v11.11.2(4 months ago)
@emotion/css is a popular CSS-in-JS library that allows developers to write styles in JavaScript code. It provides a simple and intuitive API for styling React components, giving you complete control over how your styles are defined and applied. Additionally, it supports a wide range of CSS features and allows you to use custom CSS properties and variables. With its powerful composition features, @emotion/css enables developers to easily create reusable style components that can be shared across multiple projects.
Material Design Lite (MDL) is a lightweight front-end framework that implements Material Design, Google's design language. It offers a range of pre-built UI components and provides easy-to-follow guidelines for designing clean and modern web interfaces. With MDL, you can quickly and easily create responsive websites and web apps that are both visually appealing and easy to use.
@emotion/css is gaining popularity in the React community for its powerful CSS-in-JS capabilities and simplicity. Material Design Lite (MDL) has been around for a while and has had significant adoption in the past, but its popularity has decreased in recent years as other UI frameworks and libraries have emerged.
Functionality
@emotion/css is primarily focused on providing CSS-in-JS functionality, allowing developers to write CSS within their JavaScript code. It offers features like scoped styles, media queries, and dynamic styling. MDL, on the other hand, is a UI library that implements the Material Design guidelines and provides a set of pre-styled components for building modern web applications.
Integration
@emotion/css integrates seamlessly with React. It is commonly used in React applications and is well-supported by popular React frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby. MDL can also be used with React, but it may require additional setup and customization to work effectively with a React project.
Flexibility
@emotion/css provides a high level of flexibility, allowing developers to create custom and dynamic styles using JavaScript. It supports CSS features like variables, nesting, and media queries, making it suitable for complex styling needs. MDL, on the other hand, provides a predefined set of styles and components based on the Material Design guidelines, which may limit customization options for specific design requirements.
Community and Documentation
@emotion/css has an active community and good documentation. It is well-maintained and has regular releases with updates and bug fixes. MDL, while it had a strong community in the past, has seen a decline in its community and updates. The documentation for @emotion/css is considered to be more comprehensive and up-to-date.
Performance
@emotion/css generates efficient and optimized CSS code during runtime, resulting in good performance. MDL, being a pre-styled library, may have more code to load and may not be as performant as a result.
