Contribution Proposal: Box Component

Hey F36 Community 👋

I’m proposing a new component that will reduce the overhead of writing CSS for spacing purposes. I many times see the same code being written to add margins and paddings, and I think we’d benefit from a Box component that will add a spaced box around its children. This component would simply expose padding and margin CSS properties to be set with our tokens.

Box PropTypes

Property	Values	Default
element	any html element	div
padding	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingTop	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingRight	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingBottom	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingLeft	F36 spacing token	undefined
margin	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginTop	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginRight	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginBottom	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginLeft	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginHorizontal	F36 spacing token	undefined
marginVertical	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingHorizontal	F36 spacing token	undefined
paddingVertical	F36 spacing token	undefined

<Box paddingTop="xs" margin="l" element="span">
  {children}
</Box>

Let me know what you think 😊

[suevalov]

Actually, I think all values should be undefined by default, not m

[jo-sm]

I have a few thoughts on the issue. Bear with me! 😄

I’m curious, what is this specifically trying to solve – is this trying to solve spacing (margins, padding) to wrappers like a div and essentially replace those wrapper with our own component? Or are we trying to avoid people adding wrappers simply for spacing purposes?

If we are trying to avoid the latter, I believe the real solution to this problem is to have default spacing on all components, such that you only have to add spacing between components if there is something that needs to be different than the default. This problem only really presents itself because there isn’t spacing by default on anything; for example, if you take a component such as Card, you probably would only need to add spacing classes but likely little else as provides internal styles already.

Barring default spacing being an option, I think that if we are trying to avoid/help people who add spacing to our components, then I don’t believe that the Box component is the best approach. I think that a better solution would be to add an attribute to every, or almost every, component that allows you to customize spacing. I think performance is a potential problem, but I’d worry more about the cognitive overhead of having even more components.

However, if we are trying to avoid the former, for users to avoid using layout wrapper divs, then I think a Box component may have a large benefit, even taking into account the potential cognitive overhead and performance issues.

One red flag that keeps coming to my mind with adding the Box component is now you are going to be explicitly blessing and mixing template with logic (JSX) with layout and styles. I would guess people don’t often mix those (and those that do, most likely use CSS-in-JS, which this isn’t exactly compatible with as far as I can tell) and somehow use styles in a different way (import a .css file, emotion, etc.) and so mixing spacing into the template while the other styles live somewhere else may bring complications to those using Forma. This adds to the cognitive overhead issue I mentioned earlier, but now not only is it due to our components (which can most likely be solved with familiarity and documentation) but also due to styling living in both templates and in the stylesheets.

Overall I’m not entirely convinced a Box component is a good solution, default spacing argument aside, because it will make things more complicated for those that use our library.