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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

#121

Post by 9dev »

timr wrote: post #70
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common arguments against Tailwind usually derive from total ignorance of working with CSS on large scale projects with many team members. And when this is pointed out you’ll usually get replies that just hand wave it away as not a problem, as if things like BEM were invented for no reason.

Yeah, that's a straw-man. I've worked on large-scale projects with many team members, and it's perfectly possible to use CSS as it was designed. But sure, like most tools, it starts with understanding how it works.

Sure it's possible, but is it possible for everyone on your team? Including the new hire, the interns, or the now-vibecoding managers?

Sooner or later it deteriorates.

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

#122

Post by arealaccount »

danaw wrote: post #54
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.…

you're unfairly conflating things and putting the blame for a lack of care or understanding on tailwind vs on the dev themselves. nothing about tailwind forces you to build inaccessible or "div soup" apps can tailwind be used poorly? absolutely. but that's true of any tool i've been writing CSS for ~20 years and am quite capable with it, having used CSS, Less, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, PostCSS etc. the reason i have settled…

I’ve mentioned this before here, but originally I was against Tailwind because it breaks the Cascading part of CSS, however I think a lot of websites lately work better with “locally scoped” styles as there are just so many different components that many things just dont need to follow a global style sheet. So now I usually reach for tailwind first, unless is a relatively simple vanilla html site

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

#123

Post by Merad »

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…

You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.

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

#124

Post by codethief »

arealaccount wrote: post #122
danaw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're unfairly conflating things and putting the blame for a lack of care or understanding on tailwind vs on the dev themselves. nothing about tailwind forces you to build inaccessible or "div soup" apps can tailwind be used poorly? absolutely. but that's true of any tool i've been writing CSS for ~20 years and am quite capable with it, having used CSS, Less, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, PostCSS etc. the reason i have settled…

I’ve mentioned this before here, but originally I was against Tailwind because it breaks the Cascading part of CSS, however I think a lot of websites lately work better with “locally scoped” styles as there are just so many different components that many things just dont need to follow a global style sheet. So now I usually reach for tailwind first, unless is a relatively simple vanilla html site

Global styles are like global state in software: They're best avoided.

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

#125

Post by gofreddygo »

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.…

I agree with the criticism of tailwind. IMO any good criticism warrants at least an opinion on what should be done instead or some corrective or remedial patterns.

there is a reason why tailwind got as popular as it is today. And it only highlights the gaps in either what HTML and CSS provide for the task at hand or the difficulty in that approach. This must not be lost in any criticism.

another observation is none of technical user interface decisions or discussion emphasis on the tree data structure that is inherent to every major user interface rendering mechanism relevant today. there are inherent benefits and drawbacks of it being a tree structure that neither of the developers nor the framework leverage. when thought of as a tree, it benefits from adding certain constraints and naming conventions that allow more artistic expression using just HTML and CSS that I have not seen tailwind or any other framework encourage

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

#126

Post by codethief »

romanhn wrote: post #117
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…

The more experienced Tailwind proponents probably have better things to do than get dragged into yet another online flamewar :) I've done tons of CSS since the 90s before looking into Tailwind. After it clicked, I've mostly tried to avoid raw CSS. In a sense, you exchange one mess for another. Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascad…

> Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files.

That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm a huge fan of locality (both in software engineering and in physis) but you can also "localize" your styles by scoping them appropriately. (Modern frontend frameworks typically do that automatically for you at the component level.) There is no need to use Tailwind for that.

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

#128

Post by andersonpico »

ghurtado wrote: post #107
danaw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're unfairly conflating things and putting the blame for a lack of care or understanding on tailwind vs on the dev themselves. nothing about tailwind forces you to build inaccessible or "div soup" apps can tailwind be used poorly? absolutely. but that's true of any tool i've been writing CSS for ~20 years and am quite capable with it, having used CSS, Less, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, PostCSS etc. the reason i have settled…

> can tailwind be used poorly? absolutely. but that's true of any tool Can tailwind be a useful CSS framework? Absolutely, but that can be said of any of them. Which is precisely why it makes sense to point out it's unique flaws, so that people can make an informed decision as to what works best for them. If you have some unique feature to tailwind that you think makes it better than the rest, you should share that.…

that's a really useful way to frame the discussion around tooling

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

odnckwmxkwdj wrote: post #88
mgraczyk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]
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