Forge

Why Forge?

CSS is powerful, but hostile to humans at scale.

Problems with CSS

• Styles are global and open — anything can override anything.
• There’s no link between a class in markup and its definition.
• Inline styles exist because there’s no structured way to vary styles per instance.
• Overrides are silent — conflicts happen without feedback.
• Complex components require selector gymnastics and reach-in styling.

What Forge Does Instead

• Styles are local to components and attached by generated handles, not strings.
• Parts give components named sub-targets without selectors.
• Variants replace inline styles with typed, declarative parameters.
• Style composition is deterministic (known merge order, last-wins).
• Overlapping changes are warned about in dev, not silently ignored.

What Forge Is

• A typed, local, variant-driven way to author CSS.
• A system that optimizes for people typing at a keyboard, not selectors in a cascade.

What Forge Is Not

• Not a new component model.
• Not a new language.
• Not a CSS replacement — it compiles to CSS, but removes the chaos.

Example:

import { define } from "forge"

export const Button = define("button", {
  base: "button",

  padding: 20,
  background: "blue",

  variants: {
    kind: {
      danger: { background: "red" },
      warning: { background: "yellow" },
    }
  },
})

// Usage
<Button>Click me</Button>
<Button kind="danger">Click me carefully</Button>
<Button kind="warning">Click me?</Button>

export const Profile = define("div", {
  padding: 50,
  background: "red",

  parts: {
    Header: { display: "flex" },
    Avatar: { base: 'img', width: 50 },
    Bio: { color: "gray" },
  },

  variants: {
    size: {
      small: {
        parts: { Avatar: { width: 20 }}
      }
    }
  },

  render({ props, parts: { Root, Header, Avatar, Bio } }) {
    return (
      <Root>
        <Header>
          <Avatar src={props.pic} />
          <Bio>{props.bio}</Bio>
        </Header>
      </Root>
    )
  },
})

// Usage:
import { Profile } from './whatever'

<Profile pic={user.pic} bio={user.bio} />