Tailwind has made building components in React an absolute joy for me. I don't need to scroll up to find my css-in-js definitions, I don't need to change windows to find the CSS modules, it's all there, in one place.
After trying out Tailwind in one pet project I have to say that for larger teams it should not be used. Looking at the code now I get the feeling that maintenance would be a big problem. A bigger project with multiple pages having full on Tailwind css classes peppered everywhere looks to be a nightmare. Does anyone have experience jumping into an existing larger project with legacy tailwind all over the place? Would…
Tailwind is a different way of writing CSS, with some guard-rails coming in from the design system consistency. Tailwind also provides sane defaults (rem over px, for instance).
If someone's bad at writing or thinking in CSS, chances are, they'd be bad at Tailwind too.
I've found Tailwind helps me focus on writing the CSS that matters. But just having Tailwind CSS in a project won't automagically fill one's gap in CSS knowledge.
This isn't bootstrap, where one can use some col-* utilities and magically get a grid layout that just works across browsers.
Tailwind is a bit lower level, and to achieve similar responsive layout, you still have to know how to do that with CSS grid, what the breakpoints are etc.
Where Tailwind aids here, is by providing utility classes that help with original CSS grid intuition. For instance, `grid-cols-2 sm:grid-cols-4 md:grid-cols-6` would be hard to achieve by hand, writing vanilla CSS or styled-components.
> A bigger project with multiple pages having full on Tailwind css classes peppered everywhere looks to be a nightmare.
Ideally, you would be using a framework to help organize code better. Most likely React or Vue or something similar.
In which case, you'd already have components.
There are more than one way to achieve same look and feel, with CSS. Similarly, one can apply some discipline with using Tailwind's utility classes, when building anything.
Two heuristics that have worked for me, are:
- Never use margin if you can, use flex-box and grid with gaps instead. Placing a children node is parent's responsibility.
- Write symmetric CSS. Prefer px over pl or pr, mx over ml or mr etc.
Using margins make it hard to extract some React markup as a reusable component. Using symmetric CSS gives you automatic RTL compliance without using any of the CSS logical properties.
Sure, there'd be times when a UI design cannot be implemented without breaking some of these. But in most cases I've encountered at work, building consistent UIs, have been easy for me and my team following these.
Happy to go into details with code examples, if anyone's interested.