Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#121

Post by nrk9819 » Tue, Feb 20, 2024, 8:23 AM UTC

JLehtinen wrote: post #75

Being a designer who does his work inside code, Tailwind is a nightmare. I hand off my design files, the developers do their thing. But then, maybe I want to tweak things after a review, or the design system changes, so I have to do a sweeping change to those buttons. Now I need to touch dozens of jsx/tsx files around the platform and make humongous pull requests, and the result is often dozens of merge conflicts. If…

I second this, as a designer. Maintaining atomic tokens in plain css as custom properties is much more ergonomic than having utility classes.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#122

Post by nrk9819 » Tue, Feb 20, 2024, 8:25 AM UTC

jacurtis wrote: post #17

I have no idea how tailwind has gotten so popular. Tailwind is a way to justify writing inline css in our HTML. This was once considered the cardinal sin of a frontend developer. You avoided inline-css at all costs. But now Tailwind just makes a class for text-color-blue which simply abstracts the `text-color: blue;` css property away into its own class. But don't fool yourself, you are just writing inline css by a d…

> I have no idea how tailwind has gotten so popular

- marketing - influencers - novice developers who blindly follow infulencers - great documentation

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#123

Post by monkey_monkey » Tue, Feb 20, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #70

I don't know if I've ever encountered any technology that has more "even though you like using it, you shouldn't be" energy directed at it than Tailwind. Tailwind didn't win because of marketing... it's marketing was no better or worse than the million other new products that show up in a developer's feeds every 22 hours. Lots and lots of people like using it. That's the whole story.

So much this.

I started using Tailwind pre 1.0 and if my experience with it had been shit, I would have stopped using it.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#124

Post by tipiirai » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 4:28 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #88

tipiirai wrote: post #2

Author here: This is probably the most important content piece I've ever written. Curious to hear your thoughts. Thank you!

Advice from a professional arguer: You seem to deliberately not present tailwinds strongest arguments. For example, you claim their is no next step to abstraction, but literally in the paragraphs before the ones you quoted they say to build reusable html+css components instead of trying to make css only abstractions. Which very clearly responds to your argument and complaint. There are other places in your writing li…

Thank you for the advice! You are right. I'll do that in my next article about Tailwind.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#125

Post by MrJohz » Thu, Feb 22, 2024, 7:07 AM UTC

snowcode wrote: post #114

MrJohz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true of CSS classes, though - there you have the same choice between reuse and duplication. Do you have .button-primary, .button-secondary, etc, or do you use modifiers instead? The combinatorial complexity is inherent in the design of these sorts of components, you won't get away from it just by using a different tool to write your styles.

Is this really an argument for Tailwind though? isn't this just an observation that both approaches seem to converge when the systems get very large and complex? At which time the work and effort is the same, except ..in the case of Tailwind you're using a made up syntax, and when writing similar amounts of code using CSS you can do it using the CSS standard. The key difference is that you would have to hope that Tai…

Definitely, Tailwind is just one approach to solving this problem, there are plenty of others. That said, one of the big advantages of Tailwind over other approaches, at least in my experience, is that it is far less bound to typical JS workflows, which means if you want to write HTML with your own favourite templating language, you can just drop in the Tailwind CLI and still get a lot of mileage out of the system. Compare that to CSS-in-JS or CSS modules, which are both very specific to the Javascript ecosystem.

The other big option is just using a methodology like BEM and being consistent with that, which in fairness also isn't bound to Javascript and has the benefit that - like you say - you're writing CSS as opposed to a DSL that is mostly equivalent to CSS. For me, the problems there come from the lack of tooling for writing really maintainable CSS - stuff like scoping and detecting whether a class is still in use. But it's definitely still an alternative, especially with some of the new features like nested selected that are coming out now.