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Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

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Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#21

Post by judofyr »

Isofarro wrote: post #4

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.

It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is very common and "padding-horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters.

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#22

Post by dmos62 »

wolco wrote: post #17

I have trouble with the following statement. Complete flexibility is a bad thing? If I accept that how is limiting options to 30 not providing too much flexibility? "Limits & standards. With normal CSS, I can make any element any width I want. For me, this is not a good thing! With tailwind, there are only 30ish options for width"

In some situations, choice reduction can come from abstracting them away. Then, by definition it's a good thing. Assembler v C. Of course, if the abstraction is inadequate (leaky), then you haven't really abstracted anything away.

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#23

Post by zachrose »

wolco wrote: post #17

I have trouble with the following statement. Complete flexibility is a bad thing? If I accept that how is limiting options to 30 not providing too much flexibility? "Limits & standards. With normal CSS, I can make any element any width I want. For me, this is not a good thing! With tailwind, there are only 30ish options for width"

As an example, it means you’ll never be off by a pixel here and two pixels there. You’ll be off by, say, five pixels or ten pixels instead. Your mistakes will be obvious and easy to fix.

It’s the difference between working with Lego and working with ordinary hunks of smooth plastic.

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#24

Post by leejoramo »

Be sure to check out the Wizard Zines site they are talk about. It had old school hand drawn zines about topics such as git, debugging, and more. Here is one on tcpdump

https://wizardzines.com/zines/tcpdump/

Reminds me of many computer publications in the early days

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#26

Post by projectramo »

When I make something, I want all and just the relevant pieces of what I am doing in my face, and then I want them gone when I do the next task.

So if I were to every try to design a page, I want all the relevant design items there when I am figuring it out, and then when I am done, I don't want to see them again.

So if you spend a lot of time designing the html/css then this approach makes sense. I don't want to jump into the css file and then back in the html file.

However, if I want a particular look and feel for a site, and then knock out the css, then I want the css in a different file and then I want to focus on the layout and the logic.

So my guess is that the original author builds lots of new sites and moves on. My guess is that the original author does not build one large site for a large company that has a consistent look and feel for years (till the rebrand).

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#27

Post by SunboX »

I really don't see the benefit. Sure, you don't write "CSS", but you write a lot of classes that look like CSS. If you write class="bg-white no-underline" you could easily write style="background: white; text-decoration: none;" and every frontend guy will understand it. I don't get the point.

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#28

Post by wpietri »

leejoramo wrote: post #24

Be sure to check out the Wizard Zines site they are talk about. It had old school hand drawn zines about topics such as git, debugging, and more. Here is one on tcpdump https://wizardzines.com/zines/tcpdump/ Reminds me of many computer publications in the early days

Absolutely. She's really good at making a complex topic approachable and bringing a lot of excitement as she shows you around. It reminds me how incredibly cool I thought these tools were when I first learned them.

Re: Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS

#30

Post by Isofarro »

judofyr wrote: post #21
Isofarro wrote: post #4

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.

It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose ( https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing ) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is very common and "padding-horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters.

In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters.

I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page!

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