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I just can't fathom how someone can look at this and think "yeahhhh thats some good clean code". How did tailwind get so popular? Learn plain CSS. It's really good now
I've worked in many different FE codebases with a variety of CSS "strategies". This sort of thing is objectively ugly and takes a minute to learn. The advantages of this approach I found is two-fold 1. You can be more confident that the changes you are making apply to only the elements you are interested in changing You are modifying an element directly. Contrast with modifying some class that could be on any number…
As someone that did a lot of CSS like 15 years ago when fullstack was the norm, then just sporadically for various non-public tooling, is that yes, the old ways of trying to position things really sucked and had a lot of hacks and some of those trail-n-error "how-does-this-change-the-elements-position" seems to still apply, but are much rarer now with grids/flex etc. But the structure of CSS itself is very straight-forward to me and has almost always been?
Is what's really going on that when people are trying to use vanilla CSS they go overboard with keeping CSS DRY? Which ofc ends up with an interdependent mess that's becomes increasingly harder to change. Just stop that? Start namespacing and copy pasting? CSS doesn't need to be compact.