Constant Transfer Size

Maple ships as a single ~14kb (gzipped) JavaScript file that generates styles from utility classes at runtime. This may seem counterintuitive in a world where static CSS is considered the gold standard — but Maple operates on a fundamentally different model.

An application can easily accumulate 20kb, 200kb, or even megabytes of potential styles. On a first visit, those styles must be downloaded in full before the browser can render anything. No matter how fast the user’s device is, no matter how aggressively the CSS is optimized, that network cost is paid upfront.

By generating styles only when classes are encountered, Maple shifts this trade-off. The network cost of styling becomes constant — the browser always downloads the same small runtime — while CSS is constructed incrementally based on what actually appears on the page.

This moves work from upfront network transfer to incremental runtime generation, trading bandwidth for demand-driven computation.