Why Tailwind CSS Won

Child selectors I can understand. But won't media queries mostly be limited to containers and thus used sparsely and those cases would warrant having a class of their own even if one decides that named classes for each element is a hassle?

Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on.

One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly.

This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family.

Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter?

Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win.

If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?

In terms of skillset, I’m mostly a backend guy (of 20 years or so). I know my way around HTML and CSS, and I have a decent eye for design, but it’s not my primary focus.

I recently started a writing project, and found myself unhappy with choosing a standard blog theme, and decided to build my own.

For this purpose, Tailwind has been incredible. I don’t have plans to become a front end dev, and investing significant time in improving my CSS skills is not a good use of time for what will be a fairly small project. It gives me more flexibility than frameworks like Bootstrap while still offering a lot of the productivity benefits. It lets me explore concepts and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t have the skills to play around with.

This thread reads like most $language/$framework/$os holy wars. There is an awful lot of hatred over a perceived lack of “purity”, or because of the perceived superiority of other approaches. Like most of these technology debates, the extreme binary positions really miss the value that can be found in the middle. Tailwind has been great for getting ideas out of my head to see how they look, and for staying focused on the content that I’m planning to write instead of getting stuck learning about browser edge cases.

If I start focusing more of my time on building UIs, I’ll invest more deeply in CSS.

I’m also fairly convinced that many of the negative comments filled with disgust at the resulting syntax have never tried it. After about 10 minutes, the conventions start to become obvious, and I can write visual elements mostly at the speed of thought. This is really quite enjoyable.

I’m also not suggesting it’s the right tool for every job. But the lack of nuance in much of the discussion here is pretty disappointing for the HN community.

I personally feel that the future of the (useful) web depends on more people choosing to do their own thing. Tools that lower the barrier to entry and simplify content creation will always be important.

People on HN (and elsewhere) said bootstrap was terrible when it was the most talked about CSS framework. Now it's tailwind.

The top comments will always be negative.

Don't give too much weight to this when choosing what tech to use.

There are two different things people could be referring to when they mention the "cascade".

One is CSS style inheritance. So if I do this:

  
    hello
    world
  

The `text-blue-500` style is going to cascade down to the descendent elements. That's just how CSS works and there's no getting around it.

The other usage of the term applies to a style of writing CSS that makes use of this cascade. So something like this:

  .card {
    color: darkgray;
  }

  .card .header {
    font-size: 20px;
  }

I think what people are referring to in this thread is the latter, which is not the cascade, but a particular approach to CSS.