🧪 Early evaluation of Chakra experiment

1st March 2021

I've installed Chakra and today I started looking at rewriting our basic layout using it. As a starting point, I referred to this run-though:

https://raptis.wtf/blog/build-a-landing-page-with-chakra-ui-part-1/

After having a look at that, I'm not sure I'm in favour of Chakra overall. It looks like most of our styling would live in component props, which mixes concerns - we'd be looking at view and layout concerns at the same time.

I reckon Chakra probably provides a lot of nice features, but we can probably get many of them by using SASS with lots of variables. And it does seem that the key components we'd need (date/time picker and tag input) would need to be provided by a third party package anyway.

Given all that, I think I'm inclined to leave it for now. I feel like we can solve things like light/dark mode with the current system if we need to. And if we're building without global CSS we'll already be in a good place.

It's quite a commitment because reworking to use a design system down the track would be an undertaking, and probably not one that we'd attempt. So although this is where I'm leaning now, I'll do some more reading and give it more thought before locking it in.

Further reading:

• https://sunscrapers.com/blog/when-to-use-a-ui-component-library-in-a-react-project/
• https://tailwindcss.com/
• https://purecss.io/
• https://medium.com/@timurcatakli/why-should-you-use-a-react-component-library-for-your-project-aa530a05e038