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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#341

Post by bvrmn »

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?

Without tailwind LLMs tend to use inline random colors, random sizes and radiuses. Project becomes an unmaintainable design soup really fast. Even with tailwind first priority is to define dark/light theme with semantic colors. After it's a smooth sail (sort of, routing, forms, state ownership and persistent url state are still an alien concept for clankers).

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#342

Post by [deleted] »

petcat wrote: post #25

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

[deleted]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#343

Post by dabinat »

jedberg wrote: post #226

With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part. The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale. Basically, running something at…

People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#344

Post by ouraf »

I love tailwind's work, but AI stole their customer base worse than a natural disaster would destroy a factory or other kind of business,

At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#345

Post by ouraf »

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?

Yes. Good design and a developer with good taste can make your site so much better than something mechanically excellent, but tasteless or derivative.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#346

Post by ikrenji »

tiborsaas wrote: post #234
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

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.

CSS was prob great for early web but now it's just a pig with lipstick on

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#347

Post by paradox460 »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #129

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, fro…

I've made arguments like this in the past, and my position hasn't changed much

https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#348

Post by win311fwg »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #173
bdcravens wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions

To hire 10 engineers you only need millions in yearly revenue. And millions in revenue does not imply that the business is worth millions. It very well, quite easily, could be worthless.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#349

Post by paulhebert »

threetonesun wrote: post #107
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?

What's "funny" is that newer/modern CSS is often very clunky to write in Tailwind, or unsupported entirely unless you build your own selectors, but AI doesn't understand those well or how broad their support is, so getting AI to write good/modern CSS outside of Tailwind is pretty difficult. I suppose someone could make a new library that is for AI tools that focuses on the latest and greatest in CSS, but there's no m…

Yeah this is my main beef with Tailwind. There are lots of modern CSS features that are really nice that you have to hack into Tailwind because they don’t really fit into a utility model.

(Any complex grid model for example. If you haven’t used grid template areas try them out! They are by far my favorite way to do complex responsive layouts)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#350

Post by zem »

reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.
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