I'm working on designing a simple ClojureScript basketball tournament bracket as my first project in Om. One of the interesting questions I've come across is where it's best to define my CSS. When I'm calculating layout attributes in code, should I add a new global CSS rule to the document, or should I define my styles inline like the Om tutorial demonstrates?

Global pros:

  • decoupled from specific HTML elements
  • one place for all layout code, all elements benefit

Global cons:

  • API to get/manipulate CSS rules is a little ugly (uses text strings, requires access to document's stylesheet object

    (goog.cssom/addCssRule stylesheet (str ".round {" "height:" height "px;" "width:" col-width "px;" "float:" "left;" "}")`

  • decoupling from DOM might allow DOM classnames and CSS rules to fall "out of sync" in code

Inline pros:

  • obvious connections between DOM elements and CSS rules applied to them
  • consistent with idioms of the Om tutorial
  • CSS rules written as attributes in a javascript hashmap, not CSS text

Inline cons:

  • generating dom element structure while computing layout properties adds complexity to layout code

I'm leaning towards doing it inline to start and switching to global if I find that I'm having trouble reasoning about or refactoring the code as it grows. I'm also going to read some more Om code; I skimmed through the Session source the other day but I can go through it again looking for where and how CSS rules were declared, and whether I like the approach.