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Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

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Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#81

Post by throwawaysleep »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

That’s the value of tailwind. You can just skip learning CSS and still get a good result. The benefit to learning it is marginal.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#82

Post by mgraczyk »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

CSS is badly designed and uses a confusing, separate DSL with arbitrary rules designed before the Internet was widely used, before web apps existed, before smartphones etc

It's trash and throwing it out is good. Not learning it is good. Tailwind is a solution to a real problem.

More importantly, AI is good at it already and it's unlikely humans will need to understand HTML/CSS at all within a year or two. There's no reason to spend time learning how the gears work, just put the cover back on

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#83

Post by [deleted] »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #72
timr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that; the common arguments for Tailwind literally derive from total ignorance of how CSS is made to work, and a disposal of guidelines that developers would worship in any other context (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself). It's really frustrating to be talking with someone about Tailwind and CSS, and realize that not only do they not know what "cascading" means, they never even considered the concept might b…

And the cascading thing is a nightmare even after years. Whenever i have written CSS/TailwindCSS which was unproblematic to extend it was when i literally switch thinking to use least amount of properties and let the page flow. Whenever i see tons of css i know it’s brittle and will cause hours of wasted time down the line to fix something which already should have been fixed.

[deleted]

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#84

Post by well_ackshually »

0x3f wrote: post #68
well_ackshually wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are lazy for not doing accessibility adjustments, because accessibility isn't for blind users. It's for the deaf ones, the ones with poor eyesight, the ones with mental deficiencies, the ones with motor issues like Parkinson's, the ones browsing your site shitfaced at 4AM, and so on and so on. Accessibility isn't a checklist to cover your ass for a percentage of the population: it's for everyone. It literally mak…

Every moment you spend doing accessibility is a moment you spend not doing other things. You could argue it has a high RoI to do accessibility, fine, but that doesn't make it lazy _not_ to do it. Maybe I have even higher RoI/EV stuff to be doing.

Accessibility is done while you do it. Not as an afterthought.

But if you're having a higher ROI writing absolute crap, feel free, it's not my website.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#86

Post by ramesh31 »

mgraczyk wrote: post #82
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

CSS is badly designed and uses a confusing, separate DSL with arbitrary rules designed before the Internet was widely used, before web apps existed, before smartphones etc It's trash and throwing it out is good. Not learning it is good. Tailwind is a solution to a real problem. More importantly, AI is good at it already and it's unlikely humans will need to understand HTML/CSS at all within a year or two. There's no…

>It's trash and throwing it out is good. Not learning it is good. Tailwind is a solution to a real problem.

Yup. Spent a decade of my career writing CSS every day, I was what you would call a "guru" and have written easily hundreds of thousands of lines of it over the years. Haven't touched a class or a stylesheet in nearly a year now, and probably never will again. Good riddance.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#87

Post by hahn-kev »

vehemenz wrote: post #15
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

A few counterpoints: Treating markup and styles separately is great, in principle, but you'll always need additional markup for certain things. We knew this going back to the early 2000s. There is nothing about Tailwind itself that forces you to use divs and spans instead of the appropriate HTML tag. Documents and interfaces are different. Tailwind makes a lot more sense for interfaces. You can use Tailwind for the i…

I always feel like the distinction between interference and document is missing in these types of discussions. Often times they're as different as native vs web dev and if you don't realize that then you're arguing about totally different things and nothing will make sense.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#88

Post by odnckwmxkwdj »

mgraczyk wrote: post #82
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

CSS is badly designed and uses a confusing, separate DSL with arbitrary rules designed before the Internet was widely used, before web apps existed, before smartphones etc It's trash and throwing it out is good. Not learning it is good. Tailwind is a solution to a real problem. More importantly, AI is good at it already and it's unlikely humans will need to understand HTML/CSS at all within a year or two. There's no…

“CSS is bad” Why? “Because reasons.” Care to explain? “No need to learn it anymore, my AI can do it for me” Okay, but why is it bad to learn it “Reasons”

Uh… what?

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#89

Post by chaosharmonic »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a little less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning HTML beyond a junior level.

It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is.

And that contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser.

A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is JavaScript -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#90

Post by pverheggen »

timr wrote: post #42
JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

It's worse than that; the common arguments for Tailwind literally derive from total ignorance of how CSS is made to work, and a disposal of guidelines that developers would worship in any other context (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself). It's really frustrating to be talking with someone about Tailwind and CSS, and realize that not only do they not know what "cascading" means, they never even considered the concept might b…

Tailwind, JS-in-CSS, and the like have become popular because they work well with the modern corporate UX workflow. A Figma component has a certain set of styles, you apply those same styles to the corresponding React component.

And none of this really violates DRY, your unit of reuse has shifted from a CSS class to a framework component. There's nothing precluding you from using an approach like DaisyUI if stock Tailwind has too much repetition for your taste.

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