Template preprocessing(?) about ember-css-modules

[cibernox]

I was thinking about this actually. With a handlebars AST tranformation all interpolations could be done in compile time.
I'd suggest some syntax like class="global-class {{someLocalPropertyLikeActiveOrDisabledOrSomething}} {{:moduleCSSClass}}"

I think that it removes the cognitive overhead of having a different attribute that text-editors don't know to autocomplete, and doing all the work in compilation time would save the component to have to hold javascript styles on it (even if it's a object that will never change)

[dfreeman]

I actually started down the path of doing template interpolation at compile time (I still have a proof-of-concept branch somewhere), but unfortunately it doesn't mesh well with class composition.

.foo {
  composes: bar;
}

Given the above, the CSS Modules compilation process doesn't change the definition of .foo to incorporate .bar's styles like a Sass @include or add the .foo selector to .bar's definition like @extend – in fact, the class definitions aren't changed at all.
Instead, the value for foo in the exported styles hash will contain references to the namespaced version of both foo and bar, so any element withclass={{styles.foo}} will end having both classes assigned.

This means that to statically interpolate the namespaced classes during template compilation, the stylesheets need to already have been processed, and we need access to that output from the AST transform. Ember CLI's build pipeline doesn't guarantee the former, and it actively prevents the latter, so I settled for pulling the class names at runtime.

Given that, I'd be hesitant to introduce a microsyntax like {{:moduleCSSClass}}, since it would just be notational shorthand for {{styles.moduleCSSClass}} rather than meaning something distinct at build time.

[cibernox]

Given that, I'd be hesitant to introduce a microsyntax like {{:moduleCSSClass}}

No question, this microsyntax was only an idea to mark nodes for a possible precompilation by a handlebars AST. I doesn't makes sense just to save a few keystrokes if the interpolation happens in runtime.

[dfreeman]

This is now released as local-class="foo" in 0.4.0.