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Coming to Terms with Tailwind

johanronsse.be

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Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#21

Post by Wolfr_ »

tambourine_man wrote: post #16

> Just like I don’t like React I will probably never really like Tailwind. >But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be a professional and write the best Tailwind code I can if that’s what’s asked of me. This is something that I can’t understand. Maybe it’s just me, but we’re incredibly fortunate to be in a market with huge demand. It’s not like we live in a React only world. You can make a pretty good living writing in wh…

The context is that we're primarily a design company, the front-end is a way to express our designs.

A big reason for me is that I want the bigger group in our company to experiment with several CSS techniques to grow as front-end developers. If I (as a manager) set a constraint on one type of CSS it is difficult to learn more.

As an agency it makes sense to have broad capabilities. I think as a freelancer it's super fine to just constrain yourself to what you like, as you state there is huge demand out there.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#22

Post by hnedeotes »

brightball wrote: post #7
hnedeotes wrote: post #3

Sincerely I don't understand what's the appeal of tailwind. It's just one more sign of dementia to add to the landscape.

After years of wrestling with what the “right” UI framework was and marrying your project to the syntax and rules, Tailwind has entirely removed that concern from my life. https://www.brightball.com/articles/thank-you-tailwindcss

But honest question, wouldn't those years of wrestling with the right UI framework be better spent learning the underlying CSS rules and adopting a simple pre-processor that gives you programmatic generation for repetitive bits?

Because in the end, tailwind is better than bootstrap, but it's still the wrong way and incentivises wrong patterns.

And by making it "standard" it makes everybody new to the field start with it and use it, foregoing learning the CSS. And will be supplanted at some point, and then there'll be the dance again. And again. It's just this that I don't understand.

At the point you're customising tailwind and classes you run into the same problems as with CSS without clear guidelines/organisation. So the only way to not run into that it's to use it as inline styles but with classes...

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#23

Post by theflyinghorse »

Sr_developer wrote: post #9
hnedeotes wrote: post #3

Sincerely I don't understand what's the appeal of tailwind. It's just one more sign of dementia to add to the landscape.

This is the thing, not all projects are super giant web applications being maintained by hundreds of front-end developers. For a dummy like me who curses at the laptop every time he needs to center a div and whose style sense pretty limited, tools like tailwind are a bless. I do a small library of components, copy what people who knows more than me does (taking examples from here https://tailwindcomponents.com/ ) ada…

I personally wouldn't trust a person who can center a div on the first try - something isn't right with them!

What makes me concerned with tailwind is that its yet another API to remember. Why would I pick it over material UI with some theming or chakraUI? Why Did you pick tailwind over material or chakra?

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#24

Post by DrBazza »

Not liking React, and Tailwind, is a bit like saying 'I don't like Netty/Sprint Boot, I'll write my own web server'.

css (and javascript/webasm) are the lowest levels in web development, of course people are going to build on top of them.

Building a design system on top of css is not a surprising outcome. It's not different to building a library on top of a language.

The only problem I have with tailwind is that it reminds me of the days of 'save this Word document as HTML' and the horror that was MS markup in HTML.

Having said that, I use it, I like it, and it allows me to just do things and move on. If I don't know something, the design is discoverable with a bit of thought, unlike the underlying css.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#25

Post by cldellow »

Wolfr_ wrote: post #19
cldellow wrote: post #14

> Then there comes the point where I have to use Tailwind for work and I am blocked by an offical account and – that feels kind of stupid? Getting blocked by a company entity for having an opinion is kind of… strange? I don't understand comments like this. You still have access to tailwindcss.com for documentation. The company doesn't owe you space in their social media conversations. The company has real customers a…

Nice of you to look up those from my hundreds of tweets. Now, since we bought Tailwind UI to do our work, we are technically also a customer.

Well, you mentioned being blocked, so I searched your name + tailwind.

Probably the company monitors the tailwind and tailwindcss keywords, saw those tweets, and decided that their signal-to-noise ratio for doing customer engagement would be better if they blocked you.

It's not a statement about your twitter account in general, or you as a person. It's just that their corporate objective wasn't served by your tweets. Now that your company is paying them, perhaps you can ask to be unblocked. Or perhaps not, as the support channels for Tailwind UI (the paid product) are GitHub, email and their private Discord.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#26

Post by leephillips »

One sentence in the article suggested that, ideally, people making websites would just learn CSS, but since that‘s an unrealistic expectation (why?), Tailwind can be useful if you have big team of “front-end engineers” who don’t quite understand the markup languages that they use in their jobs.

I can’t argue with that. But it suggests that if you work alone or in a small group, actually learning CSS might make more sense.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#27

Post by Wolfr_ »

cldellow wrote: post #25
Wolfr_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice of you to look up those from my hundreds of tweets. Now, since we bought Tailwind UI to do our work, we are technically also a customer.

Well, you mentioned being blocked, so I searched your name + tailwind. Probably the company monitors the tailwind and tailwindcss keywords, saw those tweets, and decided that their signal-to-noise ratio for doing customer engagement would be better if they blocked you. It's not a statement about your twitter account in general, or you as a person. It's just that their corporate objective wasn't served by your tweets.…

I was just using my other Twitter accounts to stay up to date, it's not a big deal.

I just genuinely wonder if blocking people that don't agree with you is a good strategy.

I guess over time things also changed, Tailwind 2y ago was not the same as Tailwind now. They hired a bigger team and became much more of a company.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#28

Post by brightball »

hnedeotes wrote: post #22
brightball wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After years of wrestling with what the “right” UI framework was and marrying your project to the syntax and rules, Tailwind has entirely removed that concern from my life. https://www.brightball.com/articles/thank-you-tailwindcss

But honest question, wouldn't those years of wrestling with the right UI framework be better spent learning the underlying CSS rules and adopting a simple pre-processor that gives you programmatic generation for repetitive bits? Because in the end, tailwind is better than bootstrap, but it's still the wrong way and incentivises wrong patterns. And by making it "standard" it makes everybody new to the field start with…

Honest answer: I already knew them.

I’d used plain CSS for years following the Zen of CSS approach which I was very fond of and I was a big fan of SASS for simplifying it too. Dealing with browser quirks got old though.

The issue is that most CSS is approached from a perspective that you’re going to reuse a specific part over and over in your HTML as a single tag.

Tailwind realizes that this happens, but simply argues that in most code it happens in templated loops instead of all over your source code. So instead it focuses on reusable parts that cover all of the browser quirks and can be easily combined.

It’s such a boost to productivity and practicality that I can’t believe it hasn’t been around forever.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#29

Post by stanmancan »

Wolfr_ wrote: post #27
cldellow wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you mentioned being blocked, so I searched your name + tailwind. Probably the company monitors the tailwind and tailwindcss keywords, saw those tweets, and decided that their signal-to-noise ratio for doing customer engagement would be better if they blocked you. It's not a statement about your twitter account in general, or you as a person. It's just that their corporate objective wasn't served by your tweets.…

I was just using my other Twitter accounts to stay up to date, it's not a big deal. I just genuinely wonder if blocking people that don't agree with you is a good strategy. I guess over time things also changed, Tailwind 2y ago was not the same as Tailwind now. They hired a bigger team and became much more of a company.

There’s a difference between disagreeing and being an ass. If you wanted to engage with them then try to have a conversation. All you did was say how terrible it was and not to use it. Big difference.

Nobody owes you their attention.

Re: Coming to Terms with Tailwind

#30

Post by jackson1442 »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #23
Sr_developer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing, not all projects are super giant web applications being maintained by hundreds of front-end developers. For a dummy like me who curses at the laptop every time he needs to center a div and whose style sense pretty limited, tools like tailwind are a bless. I do a small library of components, copy what people who knows more than me does (taking examples from here https://tailwindcomponents.com/ ) ada…

I personally wouldn't trust a person who can center a div on the first try - something isn't right with them! What makes me concerned with tailwind is that its yet another API to remember. Why would I pick it over material UI with some theming or chakraUI? Why Did you pick tailwind over material or chakra?

Having worked with Tailwind, Bootstrap, and mUI, Tailwind is by far my favorite. With bootstrap and mUI you have to work very hard to go against the grain of the design they ship with, while Tailwind forces you to make your own designs, to an extent.

Sites can _feel like_ bootstrap or mui sites, but rarely have I seen something and immediately thought “this is a Tailwind site.”

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