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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#431

Post by nsonha »

sodapopcan wrote: post #116
danvayn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to vi…

> 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.

> it's really no different than vanilla CSS

Is this supposed to be a plus? When you have indirections they're supposed to provide some abstraction and the abstraction might or might not provide the utilities you desire, but there is a point to it. A near 1:1 mapping is completely useless and just a different syntax for the sake of it.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#432

Post by Vinnl »

esskay wrote: post #277
simonw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.

I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#433

Post by mexicocitinluez »

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…

> 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.

No, it wasn't. It's a CSS utility library. I've been writing CSS for 15 years. I didn't choose Tailwind because I couldn't come to terms with CSS or native components.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#434

Post by jmull »

what wrote: post #383
jmull wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development. By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism. The paid templates extend the app…

> AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates So the AI can do a better job than the average front end web developer? Maybe you should take it a step further from “no reason to pay for templates”…

Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included.

Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#437

Post by tiborsaas »

ikrenji wrote: post #346
tiborsaas wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's the reverse, the 2026 CSS is one of the most advanced layout engine you can have.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#439

Post by Sankozi »

notahacker wrote: post #270
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. They also offered an Open Source CSS framework with the explicit goal of making it easier for you to style your own components. There was…

Vanilla CSS (rule engine based on files) is unusually hard for what it provides. It is quite bad abstraction.

Aim of many styling solutions is to completely remove brittle CSS files .

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#440

Post by micromacrofoot »

arvinsim wrote: post #412
micromacrofoot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's objectively a pathological use of CSS because it circumvents the C (cascade)

More discussion should be had if the cascade is even beneficial in the first place. It's ironic because standard software development practices advocate isolation.

I think that's some of the drive behind cascade layers, so we can have more control of the cascade
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