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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#361

Post by wise_young_man »

btown wrote: post #84
dlisboa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names! Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the cov…

[dead]

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#362

Post by hakunin »

bsimpson wrote: post #332
hakunin wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time the choice comes down to abundance of resources and community support. So if we're comparing tools (e.g. jsxstyle vs tailwind) maybe Tailwind could actually win on those parameters (no actual idea, just guessing based on the number of stars jsxstyle has on Github), but if we're comparing vanilla to [any tool] then vanilla usually takes the cake.

I often feel like I'm the only person using jsxstyle, which is wild since it was done by Pete Hunt, same guy who spun React out of Instagram.

If I was using React, I'd probably like this tool too. The best counter to "community supported" is "so conceptually simple and small that it doesn't need a community". But perhaps that's kind why I'm not big on React in general.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#363

Post by slopinthebag »

echelon wrote: post #326
slopinthebag wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt AI will ever become omniscient

Hydrated sugars certainly think they themselves did.

if you mean this in a reductionist way for humans, i dont think most of us think we’re omniscient

my point more broadly is that if you have an incomplete spec, any entity implementing it either needs to be omniscient or make assumptions about the intended behaviour of the system. if constraints or invariants aren't part of the spec it might be difficult or outright impossible to make the right assumptions.

so while LLMs might be writing all of the code in the future, someone will still need to create the spec + verify it. and often the spec is not really possible to know until implementation begins...

ive been using astra on a project that isn't even that complex in the grand scheme of things, and it still fails to make the right assumptions. of course i could just give it a full complete spec right?! except i didn't know what the right assumptions were either until implementation anyways. so to some extent they were unknowable to me, and thus unknowable to the llm no matter how powerful.

I do think in the future humans will probably write very little code themselves, but the work will be all about specification + verification and that means system design, which is the stuff I care about anyways. maybe I won't develop rsi when I get older :)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#364

Post by sodapopcan »

eudamoniac wrote: post #188
sodapopcan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything I've heard this before, but it's really no different than vanilla CSS. My guess is that people started pointing this out is that Tailwind got more non-frontend people digging into styling more where they were hit with how much shit there is in CSS.

For me I know CSS quite well, but I would always have to look up some utility names that had no intuitive mapping. line-height is leading, flex-direction has no direct mapping, text-wrap is text but also font size is text, so if trying to do font-size:custom you had to do some weird syntax unlike the other custom value syntax lest it confuse text-[1rem] with a text-wrap rule. There are a lot of these weird decisions.…

All good points. To be clear, though, I wasn't trying to insinuate that Tailwind has NO design smells.

I also like Tailwind, though I don't really use it anymore.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#365

Post by sodapopcan »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #211
paradox460 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IE, it has a built-in design system!

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#367

Post by sodapopcan »

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…

A bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#370

Post by sneak »

atonse wrote: post #79
dlisboa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The market didn’t decide it was needed, the users just downloaded a bunch of free files and free docs. There isn't any indication there was ever a real market.

Using something free and paying for a product are entirely different things.

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