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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#211

Post by krainboltgreene »

paradox460 wrote: post #154
sodapopcan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.

You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better thi…

Don't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#213

Post by onion2k »

dlisboa wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.

You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#214

Post by psygn89 »

nullbio wrote: post #133
mehagar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you switching to?

I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX. It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot. Can't say for certain whether it…

For us we went with CSS modules, it just made more sense for us to stay closer to web fundamentals since our styles are used across different tech stacks. From my experience in the last year, AI is quite good at sticking to your css ground rules and gleaning css patterns from other files all while being underpinned by design tokens (can have linters raise raw values to question also). Gotta use whatever works best for the job!

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#218

Post by matsemann »

bdcravens wrote: post #143
atonse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.

There are several graphing libraries that have been businesses for years. Like Highcharts. A frontend framework used by millions and millions certainly has some value to loads of people.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#219

Post by lstodd »

I remember the time when I did not need any fancy frameworks, webfonts, tons of JS and effin cdns to present my thoughts to the world.

This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#220

Post by sergiotapia »

Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering?

Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.

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