CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems • Hacker News Board

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#101

Post by roguecoder » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:12 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #4

If you go even minimally outside the beaten path, the tailwind CSS declarations can mutate into a frankenstein monster that makes regular CSS look like a friendly, cute koala Example: https://www.nikolailehbr.ink/blog/realistic-button-design-cs... shows an "old fashioned", 90's are back-in-vogue, 3d button. Tailwind CSS for it becomes After I got eye-strain and headaches after taking over maintenance of a tailwind ba…

The power of CSS is that it can capture semantics. Tailwind gives up on all of that.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#102

Post by roguecoder » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #66

This is a novel take that I think genuinely adds something to tired tailwind discourse: > I think the most important factor in Tailwind's success is that it does one thing very correctly: it demands the developer who installs it set up a config file that lays out all codebase-wide style constants: colors, margin sizes, fonts, border radii, etc. Writing individual styles that do not use a pre-configured constant from…

It is also a great example of where worse is better, when it leads people to doing work they always needed to do.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#103

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #20

mohsen1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be against Tailwind. Now that I've used long enough I can tell you that code is perfectly fine. I can read it and easily modify it. You can comment it out if you care After

Reading though this, I really have to wonder how this is better than After Why make a bunch of css classes when it looks to me like the "style" will be roughly the same amount of code and readability.

The simple answer is that inline styles lack support for a bunch of basic stuff like pseudo-classes and media queries. I think the Tailwind team would tell you that they would love to have native web support for full-featured inline styles and that this would obviate many of the reasons to use Tailwind.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#104

Post by micromacrofoot » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #32

micromacrofoot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe people find even half of this acceptable, do they never use a browser inspector in their work?

If you write enough CSS for a site... eventually you end up building utility classes anyway. Now, you re-invented Tailwind... but in your own proprietary way that nobody else understands. Tailwind takes the inverse approach. The example posted by the parent above is completely unambiguous - what you see is what you get, and it's done the same way everywhere Tailwind is used. You can read the component's styles and un…

You can just write padding-left: 20px; and not memorize any additional layer? If you really love abstraction that much you can do padding: var(--pl20);

Bonus is that you actually know how to use CSS

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#105

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #6

lenkite wrote: post #4

If you go even minimally outside the beaten path, the tailwind CSS declarations can mutate into a frankenstein monster that makes regular CSS look like a friendly, cute koala Example: https://www.nikolailehbr.ink/blog/realistic-button-design-cs... shows an "old fashioned", 90's are back-in-vogue, 3d button. Tailwind CSS for it becomes After I got eye-strain and headaches after taking over maintenance of a tailwind ba…

I can't believe people find even half of this acceptable, do they never use a browser inspector in their work?

This Chrome extension is widely recommended when using atomic CSS:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/atomic-css-devtools...

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#106

Post by roguecoder » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

wuz wrote: post #57

Tailwind has taken the world by storm because it let's engineers completely ignore actually learning the technology that powers the web. That doesn't make it good - and it isn't. It's a bloated mess with tons of random technology surrounding the ecosystem in an attempt to make it usable. Tailwind literally only becomes usable for large scale applications once you have combined base tailwind, postcss, a number of tail…

Web technologies succeed when they let people not have to understand things. React is the same as tailwind: it captures the box model experts already used to reason about web pages and made it literal.

As long as the job of "web developer" is about assembly-line delivery of features, it will continue to be strategic to choose tools that are worse for experts and better for amateurs.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#107

Post by dontlikeyoueith » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #40

mootothemax wrote: post #26

Tailwind is magical to me for one reason alone: I can now design. As someone who spent 20+ years as a jack-of-all-trades / full-stack developer, specialising in back-end and database skills, this has largely been... confusing. Before, I couldn't even make plain text work. Totally hopeless, I didn't have the eye for things. Now though, now I help my kids lay out their homework to be more visually pleasing. It's bizarr…

A decade ago Bootstrap helped a generation of programmers who don't know how to design make pleasantly looking websites. I fail to see how Tailwind is better suited to that task than Bootstrap.

Because it's newer and trendy and that's important for programmers learning their first tool that solves an old problem.

Whether it should be important is another question, but it's a simple fact that it is.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#108

Post by roguecoder » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

ahuth wrote: post #46

Can't agree that Tailwind is popular because it forces you to setup a centralized config file (although I guess that is nice). It's because, as ugly as a long line of inline classes can be, it's easy to know exactly what styles are being applied to an element. Especially when there are more than 1 or 2 devs writing styles.

... do people not know about browser developer tools?

Unless a project has really messed up, it is trivial to see what styles are being applied to any element.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#109

Post by mejutoco » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

freddydumont wrote: post #43

I have come to the same conclusion as the OP: people like tailwind not for its API or ergonomics but for its design system. Tailwind can actually be decent for templating systems and it’s likely why it’s shipped with Phoenix for example. But for React components, it’s definitely a step back from CSS-in-JS, which gave you style encapsulation out of the box. Not sure what’s up with the knee-jerk reaction against it in…

I just use tailwind inside components. This problem is because of no components + tailwindcss, not because of tailwind usage alone. Nothing is stopping one from using components that use tailwind.

Re: CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems

#110

Post by sorcercode » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:21 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #38

Been using Tailwind since starting my job 5 years ago where we have a ton of webapps standardized on Angular+Tailwind, and you may have to hop into a webapp you've never heard of before to fix a bug. Couldn't be happier with how much easier it is to build and maintain compared to traditional CSS. Many many words I've read trying to convince me why I shouldn't be having a good time using it, yet here I am more product…

i appreciate the OP's take and insight but couldn't agree more with this comment.

> yet here I am more productive than ever thanks to it. i have first hand experience with most of the css frameworks. heck, even wrote a custom scss one at one point, but eventually there's a simplicity (admittedly to a fault at times) to tailwind that just makes you more productive.

> Plus people sticking to increments of 0.25rem ins this is another really good point that doesn't come through as much. Tailwind also does a fantastic job of picking the right defaults which 90% of the internet won't do.

from the OP's original piece

>> it demands the developer who installs it set up a config file that lays out all codebase-wide style constants: colors, margin sizes, fonts, border radii, etc.

... or importantly, it sets up a solid set of defaults.