We use [glamor](https://github.com/threepointone/glamor) to provide a great built-in solution for CSS isolation and modularization without trading off any CSS features.
Glamor's [HowTo](https://github.com/threepointone/glamor/blob/master/docs/howto.md) shows converting various CSS use cases to Glamor. See Glamor's [API docs](https://github.com/threepointone/glamor/blob/master/docs/api.md) for more details.
Create a folder called `static` in your project root directory. From your code you can then reference those files with `/static/` URLs, e.g.: `<img src="/static/file-name.jpg" />`.
Notice that to load data when the page loads, we use `getInitialProps` which is an [`async`](https://zeit.co/blog/async-and-await) static method. It can asynchronously fetch anything that resolves to a JavaScript plain `Object`, which populates `props`.
For the initial page load, `getInitialProps` will execute on the server only. `getInitialProps` will only be executed on the client when navigating to a different route via the `Link` component and the `props.url`.
When you are switching between pages, Next.js will download new pages from the server and render them for you. So, it'll take some time to download. Because of that, when you click on a page, it might wait few milliseconds (depending on the network speed) before it render the page.
> Once the Next.js has download the page, it'll reuse it in the next time when you navigate to that same page.
This is a problem specially in UX wise. "Prefetching Pages" is one of our solutions for this problem. With this, Next.js will prefetch pages behind the scene using the support of [Service Workers](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/getting-started/primers/service-workers).
#### Declarative API
You can simply ask Next.js to prefetch pages using `next/prefetch`. See:
```jsx
import Link from 'next/prefetch'
// This is the header component
export default () => (
<div>
<Linkhref='/'>Home</Link>
<Linkhref='/about'>Home</Link>
<Linkhref='/contact'>Home</Link>
</div>
)
```
Here you are using `<Link>` from `next/prefetch` instead of `next/link`. It's an extended version of `next/link` with prefetching support.
Then Next.js will start to prefetch all the pages behind the scene. So, when you click on any of the link it won't need to do a network hit to fetch the page.
If you need, you could stop prefetching like this:
```jsx
<Linkhref='/contact'prefetch={false}>Home</Link>
```
#### Imperative API
You can get started with prefetching using `<Link>` pretty quickly. But you may want to prefetch based on your own logic. (You may need to write a custom prefetching `<Link>` based on [premonish](https://github.com/mathisonian/premonish).)
Then you can use the imperative API like this:
```jsx
import { prefetch } from 'next/prefetch'
prefetch('/')
prefetch('/features')
```
When you simply run `prefetch('/page_url')` we'll start prefetching that page.
> We can only do this, if `prefetch` is called when loading the current page. So in general, make sure to run `prefetch` calls in a common module all of your pages import.
Note: we recommend putting `.next` in `.npmignore` or `.gitignore`. Otherwise, use `files` or `now.files` to opt-into a whitelist of files you want to deploy (and obviously exclude `.next`)
If you want to create re-usable React components that you can embed in your Next.js app or other React applications, using `create-react-app` is a great idea. You can later `import` it and keep your codebase clean!
`next/css` is powered by [Glamor](https://github.com/threepointone/glamor). While it exposes a JavaScript API, it produces regular CSS and therefore important features like `:hover`, animations, media queries all work.
**Please note**: we are very interested in supporting regular CSS, since it's so much easier to write and already familiar. To that end, we're currently exploring the possibility of leveraging Shadow DOM to avoid the entire CSS parsing and mangling step [[#22](https://github.com/zeit/next.js/issues/22)]
This results in better compilation performance and less memory usage (especially for large projects). No `cssom`, `postcss`, `cssnext` or transformation plugins.
This is important for server-side rendering, but also during the lifecycle of the page. Since Next.js enables `pushState` transitions that load components dynamically, unnecessary `<style>` elements would bring down performance over time.
While these are tractable for CSS itself, we don’t need to duplicate the efforts in tooling and libraries to accomplish them.
</details>
<details>
<summary>What syntactic features are transpiled? How do I change them?</summary>
We track V8. Since V8 has wide support for ES6 and `async` and `await`, we transpile those. Since V8 doesn’t support class decorators, we don’t transpile those.
- Top-level components can define `getInitialProps` that should _block_ the loading of the route (either when server-rendering or lazy-loading)
As a result, we were able to introduce a very simple approach to routing that consists of two pieces:
- Every top level component receives a `url` object to inspect the url or perform modifications to the history
- A `<Link />` component is used to wrap elements like anchors (`<a/>`) to perform client-side transitions
We tested the flexibility of the routing with some interesting scenarios. For an example, check out [nextgram](https://github.com/zeit/nextgram).
</details>
<details>
<summary>How do I define a custom fancy route?</summary>
We’re adding the ability to map between an arbitrary URL and any component by supplying a request handler: [#25](https://github.com/zeit/next.js/issues/25)
On the client side, we'll add a parameter to `<Link>` so that it _decorates_ the URL differently from the URL it _fetches_.
</details>
<details>
<summary>How do I fetch data?</summary>
It’s up to you. `getInitialProps` is an `async` function (or a regular function that returns a `Promise`). It can retrieve data from anywhere.
If you’re building a very small mostly-content website, you still want to benefit from features like lazy-loading, a component architecture and module bundling.
But in some cases, the size of React itself would far exceed the content of the page!
For this reason we want to promote a situation where users can share the cache for the basic runtime across internet properties. The application code continues to load from your server as usual.
We are committed to providing a great uptime and levels of security for our CDN. Even so, we also **automatically fall back** if the CDN script fails to load [with a simple trick](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CDNsFailButYourScriptsDontHaveToFallbackFromCDNToLocalJQuery.aspx).
To turn the CDN off, just set `{ “next”: { “cdn”: false } }` in `package.json`.
</details>
<details>
<summary>What is this inspired by?</summary>
Many of the goals we set out to accomplish were the ones listed in [The 7 principles of Rich Web Applications](http://rauchg.com/2014/7-principles-of-rich-web-applications/) by Guillermo Rauch.
The ease-of-use of PHP is a great inspiration. We feel Next.js is a suitable replacement for many scenarios where you otherwise would use PHP to output HTML.
Unlike PHP, we benefit from the ES6 module system and every file exports a **component or function** that can be easily imported for lazy evaluation or testing.
As we were researching options for server-rendering React that didn’t involve a large number of steps, we came across [react-page](https://github.com/facebookarchive/react-page) (now deprecated), a similar approach to Next.js by the creator of React Jordan Walke.
