There have been a great many thoughts by thought-leaders thinking thoughts about the future of CSS in a JavaScript encapsulated world. A lot of those thoughts seem to portend the death of CSS as a wholly separate language to describe presentational relationships of various pieces of markup. And, to a large degree, many of those thought-thinkers are right. CSS and its importance in the new web ecosystem has evolved a lot in the past few years and not necessarily in a way that has been kind to the new frameworks on the block nor to the idea of an inheritance-based presentational layout language. Playing nice with React and CSS hasn’t always been F-U-N, but using JS and CSS together can at least be F-U-N[CTIONAL] and maybe a little bit easier. Read the article on Medium.
Empowering designers with the means to code requires them to adopt development tools. Obviously, most development tools are built for engineers, but when designers code, coding tools are necessarily design tools and become fundamental to designers' process. That ultimately means that the text editor or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) becomes central to that workflow.
It's about time we treat the IDE as a design tool and begin to use it in ways that fit our processes as designers. Read the article on Medium.