Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 408 posts

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#231

Post by zelphirkalt »

raincole wrote: post #124
dlisboa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY? A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds…

Frontend development in the early days was nightmare. I don't know why people pretend there was some kind of golden age but there really was not. You could still develop frontend in the old way. Most browsers are very good at supporting old websites. But on one wants that.

Nowadays though, that old way is working very well, because of all the things that were added to HTML and CSS, making things, which used to be annoying or difficult mostly easy.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#232

Post by hoppp »

I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI.

Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#233

Post by lucumo »

gherkinnn wrote: post #149
vazark wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

Oh why can't this idea die, it has been continuously debunked for 6 years now. So much so, any TW discussion will reiterate it.

> Oh why can't this idea die

People like to feel superior to others, so dunking on people using a popular technology tickles some pleasure centers. Considering another viewpoint gets in the way of that, so other viewpoints are ignored.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#234

Post by tiborsaas »

vazark wrote: post #88
fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

IMO, Tailwind is just inline CSS with standardised defaults. I think it found its place because most React devs didn't want to bother with CSS

It found its place because working on CSS on any non-trivial scale with multiple engineers is painful. The best way to deal with CSS at scale is not to write CSS. And this comes from me who really likes CSS.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#236

Post by djmips »

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.

Millions is a very modest business these days

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#237

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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.

But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering?

Why shouldn't that exist?

The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent.

Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself.

> 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.

I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there.

They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#238

Post by xixixao »

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…

This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#240

Post by zelphirkalt »

stephbook wrote: post #157
fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

Believe me, I try all the time. But HTML and CSS are not made for the modern web. Styling radio buttons, working date inputs, forms that POST automatically, typeahead and server-side validation (eg username already taken.) You spend all your time reinventing the wheel and then it's buggy and looks like a dog. To say nothing of the inevitable poly fills and Cross-Browser issues.

I have not run into cross-browser differences in a long time. That is differences, that actually mattered and for which I would have had to build any workaround. I have built several websites recently, using vanilla HTML and CSS and solved everything using server-side rendering.

What problems specifically do you see with server-side rendering?

Post reply on HN