Who is using GSS?

[franciscolourenco]

Do you have examples of websites using GSS in production?
Any popular ones?

[Inviz]

Not many yet. Nothing popular for sure.

I think current limitation to popularity is general runtime overhead compared to static css and html, especially on mobile. Regular web design rarely features things that actually need constraints (complex alignments, conflicting rules, indirection). And it takes some time to undestand how to write GSS without doing same mistakes as in CSS land (e.g. over-using media queries, lack of composition).

As of lately, GSS can produce static CSS pages removing all runtime overhead, as long as content is static. Internally we use GSS as a preprocessor (with a swarm of remote browsers that do the job). But you need to have a real reason to do it that way. In our case it's mass-produced customized design.

I mean, I love gss, but I wouldn't use it for my blog.

[paulyoung]

@aristidesfl thegrid.io is built using GSS and is pretty popular if you consider our traffic and signups 😉

Some of our other sites, gridstylesheets.org and flowhub.io, are also built using GSS.

All sites built by The Grid's AI use GSS and are leveraging some newer features that weren't around or mature enough to be used in the other sites.

I can't imagine using CSS again for layout after using GSS and would use it for my blog or any other project regardless of size or scope.

[franciscolourenco]

gridstylesheets.org and other sites mentioned are blank when javascript is disabled. Are they not using pre-compiled stylesheets as backup?

[shehi]

Bingo... No JS no site.
On May 13, 2015 11:10 AM, "Aristides Lourenco" [email protected]
wrote:

gridstylesheets.org and other sites mentioned are blank when javascript
is disabled. Are they not using pre-compiled stylesheets as backup?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#184 (comment).

[paulyoung]

thegrid.io uses a technique which computes the values of the layout ahead of time (using a headless browser) which we then feed to the engine.

While this saves each visitor's browser from doing the same work and improves performance (especially on mobile), it still requires the GSS runtime.

Newer sites built by The Grid are being pre-computed and rendered fully using pure CSS using a similar technique.

We're including the runtime during development but not at all in production.

The final CSS produces a consistent experience across browsers and devices, maintaining breakpoints and animations.

We can thank @Inviz for that 👏

[jamesdarvell]

@paulyoung
What's the current method for pre-computing and exporting the pure CSS? Do you use gss2css?