I don't get tailwind at all. I never pressed the play button in terms of the article, but it's like promoting the use of MS Word without formatting styles... You end up with masses of shitty documents formatted with a wild mix of overlapping formatting options and extra spaces. And yes, I am looking at you, Mom... ;)
Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#12I work with designers who don’t know how to write CSS and who sometimes use Bootstrap for mock-ups (on a system not built on Bootstrap). They spend their whole day in Figma. The designers try to come up with design systems, but never finish them.
Tailwind works pretty well for us.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#13I think the argument about Tailwind is overblown because half the people using it should just be using a component library.
Component libraries suck when you need to massage a design system into them. But at least half the arguments over Tailwind vs CSS are devs mostly doing their own thing and touting how easy it is to change X Y and Z. Similarly those same devs hate component libraries because you can't just change X without changing X everywhere.
_
A little secret they don't realize is, X changed everywhere so that your site wouldn't look like a pile of slop.
That's why even the darling of the "anti-component-library pro-ctrl+c-ctrl+v establishment" shadcn/ui had to go back and add theming and a component.json.
If not using a component library is easier for you, that's a red flag: the alternative should be your team rolled out their own design system, and that's just a different kind of difficult with a different set of trade offs.
If you're using a design system, I don't think CSS vs Tailwind is as much of a mortal conflict because the design system provides a map. Usually that map gets translated into something like variables, or even Tailwind Variants, and suddenly the biggest issue with Tailwind (scattering consistent properties across the codebase) is not as terrible as it seemed.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#14So the takeaway for me here is to avoid dogma, and if your “senior” coworkers are forcing it on you, leave asap. Oh and if you want to be productive, use Tailwind first and hand craft the small percent of CSS where that’s required later, if such a thing actually occurs. Everything else is just religion (in the emacs vs vim sense).
> use Tailwind first and hand craft the small percent of CSS where that’s required later
What is the difference between Tailwind and in-line CSS?
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#15I don't get tailwind at all. I never pressed the play button in terms of the article, but it's like promoting the use of MS Word without formatting styles... You end up with masses of shitty documents formatted with a wild mix of overlapping formatting options and extra spaces. And yes, I am looking at you, Mom... ;)
https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles
That seems to be even more horrible than I expected, multi-cursor editing, seriously?
@apply and the frowned upon solution is what I would expect to be the only clean solution.
I am a proponent of WET, but pulling the naming things card when it comes to places that you may want to localize, test or aria-label anyway, just seems lazy to me.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#16Tailwind is the modern equivalent of Bootstrap. Most teams do not have a dedicated designer. Most developers are quite bad at CSS. These teams, which are most teams, want to ship something that is not butt-ugly and do it fast. That's what Bootstrap did and what Tailwind does. All the endless discussions about the technical merit of inlining utility classes versus hand-crafting CSS are pointless and cannot be resolved…
Tailwind is just a slightly easier way to write CSS. It doesn't have any in-built styles or components, so is nothing like Bootstrap. You are probably using Tailwind UI or some other component framework on top of it (which is the equivalent to Bootstrap that you are talking about).
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#17Tailwind is the modern equivalent of Bootstrap. Most teams do not have a dedicated designer. Most developers are quite bad at CSS. These teams, which are most teams, want to ship something that is not butt-ugly and do it fast. That's what Bootstrap did and what Tailwind does. All the endless discussions about the technical merit of inlining utility classes versus hand-crafting CSS are pointless and cannot be resolved…
I don't think this is right at all. Tailwind comes with no opinions about your styles other than their default units of length (p-1, p-2, p-3) having a set REM scaling. Perhaps you're thinking of e.g. DaisyUI [0]? Or some other CSS framework built on Tailwind? [0] https://daisyui.com/
The default REM scaling is one of my main gripes about Tailwind.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#18For me, Tailwind takes away a third of the two hardest things in computer science: naming things.
Extremely useful when building out a design system for the first time.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#19I've been working in CSS for over 20 years. I know it very well. Tailwind is also my absolute most favorite technology to come along in a long time. I would even argue to use it effectively you also need to understand CSS well. The smart steering analogy doesn't jive with me at all.
It seems like their analogy is based on one experience with Tailwind where the author was put under ridiculous constraints with Tailwind (constraints that even the author suggests is not typical Tailwind usage).
The analogy didn't reflect my experience either.
Re: Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
#20tl;dr: noobs often like tailwind; veterans often dislike it. Both are right and both are wrong. Context is everything. Tailwind serves a function, but it will never fully replace native CSS APIs. "Can't we all just get along."