When developing web applications, choosing a UI component library is one of the earliest decisions your team has to make. Beyond reducing the amount of functionality your team has to maintain, UI component libraries shield developers from the complexities involved in designing user interactions that are accessible and behave correctly across browsers and devices.

As modern reactive front ends have begun to converge on effective module patterns and universal approaches to common application paradigms, it’s not uncommon to see much of the variance between frontends as far as how they expose and implement their given style guide. The implementation and the delivery of application styles to an underlying component tree have become almost an art form, where each application attempts to solve the ever-present CSS problems of naming and reuse in the best, most effective way possible.

The CSS Paint API is a modern web platform feature to programmatically create images in JavaScript which are rendered to the page when referenced by CSS. You create images using the Canvas API, an API with which you may already be familiar.

As we create and improve open source software, and build many applications for our customers, we’re constantly looking for things that will improve the software we create. Part of this is looking at an often dizzying array of proposed and emerging standards, and finding those that feel efficient and ready for use.

As new user interface component frameworks are created and old frameworks are replaced with emerging technologies, methods for styling those components must change with them. Long gone are the days of creating a simple HTML component and importing a simple CSS file with corresponding class names.

Performance is a critical part of most applications. Research continually shows that good performance is essential for a good user experience.

In large JavaScript applications, it can be beneficial to dynamically load CSS stylesheets. For example, if a certain JavaScript widget, such as a complex grid, uses a large standalone stylesheet for its display aesthetics, it would be optimal to only load this stylesheet if the widget is in use, rather than always including the CSS source on each application load.

In this post, we want to walk through how you would get started building an application using xstyle, an extensible CSS framework. xstyle provides extensions that allows us to declaratively describe an user interface, making use of data bindings, element generation, and components, giving us an elegant means to create an application.

The new dgrid is a powerful, but lightweight grid component. It is specifically built to be easily styled with CSS, rather than relying on programmatic properties and changes.

Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together.