Head-to-Head: Material Components for the web vs styled-jsx Analysis
material-components-web
v14.0.0(over 1 year ago)
The Material Components for the web (MDC Web) is an open-source project that provides a development and integration platform for building high-quality user experiences. It allows developers to implement Google's Material Design guidelines using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. MDC Web includes many UI components like buttons, cards, text fields, menus and many more that are designed to make web development faster and more consistent. These components are customizable and are built with accessibility in mind.
Styled-JSX is a library that allows you to write scoped CSS for your React components. It provides a way to style your components using traditional CSS syntax, while ensuring that the styles only apply to that component and not its children or parent. This is achieved through the use of CSS modules and a custom babel plugin which transforms the styles to a unique class name with randomly generated hashes.
material-components-web is a popular library that implements the Material Design guidelines and is widely adopted in the web development community. styled-jsx, on the other hand, is also quite popular but is more niche and commonly used in the React ecosystem for styling components.
Styling Approach
material-components-web provides pre-defined components with a specified Material Design look and feel. It focuses on providing a consistent visual language across platforms. styled-jsx, on the other hand, is a CSS-in-JS solution that allows styling React components using scoped CSS directly within the component.
Flexibility and Customization
styled-jsx provides more flexibility and customization options as it allows writing full-fledged CSS styles within components. It supports dynamic styles and CSS features like media queries, animations, and keyframes. material-components-web, being an implementation of Material Design, offers less flexibility in terms of customization, as the styles are predefined to adhere to the Material Design guidelines.
Integration
styled-jsx seamlessly integrates with React and Next.js projects by providing a Babel plugin that enables scoped CSS. material-components-web also integrates well with React, but it is not limited to a specific framework and can be used with any JavaScript library or framework.
Component Ecosystem
material-components-web provides a comprehensive set of components that cover various UI elements and patterns outlined in the Material Design guidelines. It offers ready-to-use components like buttons, cards, menus, and more. styled-jsx, being a styling solution, does not provide a component library but can be used to style any React component.
Performance
styled-jsx generates unique classNames and scopes the CSS styles to each component, which can improve performance by reducing global CSS conflicts and minimizing CSS footprint. material-components-web uses CSS classes to apply styles, which may result in a larger CSS file and potential conflicts with other CSS on the page. However, the performance impact is dependent on the specific use case and project setup.
