I wrote CSS from scratch since version one. I know why it's called cascading, I have used many preprocessors and generally don't mind writing CSS at all. That being said, all my attempts to modularize my stylesheets looked like a incomplete and buggy version of Tailwind. I could imagine that this is the reason why it's popular. Also people seem to always be ignoring the fact that you can just use tailwind to create helper classes. Nobody forces you to repeat common styles a million times.
Why Tailwind CSS Won
221–230 of 559 posts
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#222Gray beard's 5c: Tailwind is a farce and a catastrophe. It's as modern as the style parameter is, and it's as reusable as a moving a dirt pile from one corner to the next. You're not learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind. Learn CSS, that will stick with you for the next 20 years. It amuses me when a library is implemented 'with tailwind', which means it's totally useless to the people _not using tailwind_,…
Five years? How about now.
I saw a video a few months back featuring a VScode plugin to hide tailwind styles.
If you have to use a plugin to manage your nuclear waste code by hiding most of it something is wrong.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#223I never got how is "context switching" such a problem. I mean, can't you have like, two files opened side-by-side in different IDE panels? Is it really that hard to "look jump" from one another? This justifies the amount of overhead added by a library like this? If I can be blunt: I find this "argument" to be lazy as **. Sorry but "context switching" is just a fancy name for "having two files opened at the same time"…
You've never had to search through multiple stylesheets and Inspect to figure out inheritance and cascading for a CSS rule that is resisting editing? I recently had to work with another developer's codebase that had four different CSS files influencing the HTML, only to find in a fifth file an !important that was mucking everything up. If you haven't experienced costly context switching working on FE then consider yo…
Well, this is bad CSS indeed. But it does not have to be that way. A little linting with Stylelint can make sure this does not happen. As an added bonus there are less dependencies and complexity.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#224I never got how is "context switching" such a problem. I mean, can't you have like, two files opened side-by-side in different IDE panels? Is it really that hard to "look jump" from one another? This justifies the amount of overhead added by a library like this? If I can be blunt: I find this "argument" to be lazy as **. Sorry but "context switching" is just a fancy name for "having two files opened at the same time"…
You've never had to search through multiple stylesheets and Inspect to figure out inheritance and cascading for a CSS rule that is resisting editing? I recently had to work with another developer's codebase that had four different CSS files influencing the HTML, only to find in a fifth file an !important that was mucking everything up. If you haven't experienced costly context switching working on FE then consider yo…
No, the element inspector will tell you what css file the rule is coming from.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#225I work every day with web projects, and the notion "Tailwind won" in any capacity sounds like a thunder from a clear sky. If we see more articles to that effect and this is not an outlier, it means the Tailwind cult is in its "red dwarf" stage, where the community becomes smaller, but denser and more convinced than ever that the entire world is a copy of their small bubble. That's good, it means in a few years Tailwi…
> That's good, it means in a few years Tailwind will be considered a dead tech.
And that’s good because of what, beyond your own personal preference as to your Framework Of Choice?
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know CSS why are you using Tailwind which is esoteric CSS but worse? Just use CSS.
So glad to read comments like this. I cannot believe my eyes that most devs these days just don't get it and litter their projects with layer upon layer upon layer of unnecessary complexity. I thought a person had to be rational to become a developer but oh my, how wrong I was.
Everyone is a developer.
This is the paradox of popularity. The theory goes that if you have a large pool of X to select from, then you can select the best of the best, and the quality of your selection will be amazing.
But it's exactly the opposite. Small groups are self-selecting for quality and big groups are self-selecting for quantity. O_O
English, the universal international language. The one we're speaking here, right now. The worst translators in the world are English translators. Everyone feels qualified to speak it and translate it. Finding a good English translator is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The more "easy languages" and "frameworks" we have, the more "programmers" we also have, and 99.999% of them have the faintest clue what they're doing, but they just keep hitting their keyboard with a hammer, and it compiles and produces interesting results, so they keep doing it.
This is also why social networks have an amazing set of interactions when they're new, and in an old social network you have hundreds of millions of users, but no one writes anything interesting, anyone barely reads, and it's full of scams, bots, clickbait and garbage.
There's safety in numbers, the saying goes. Not at all. If something is universally popular, and you choose to enter it, get ready for a shitstorm.
P.S.: Tailwind is garbage.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
What causes me to constantly shudder is when I have to use project wide search to find the class name on an element so I can see what was caused the computed styles in the browser to occur. 1. Find source file with class name. See the scss extension, dread rises a bit. 2. See scss file has multiple @import directives and uses multiple custom functions. 3. Open up 4 more scss files to see what those imports and functi…
But these are self-inflicted wounds. Having standards and validation for CSS is easy. No need for all of this. No need for SASS either. Install Stylelint and there you are.
I've encountered this situation in multiple projects where style lint was enabled, with only the defaults, and passed the linter without issue.
Tailwind is seeing steadily increasingly popularity (and the accompanying backlash) because it is straight forward and does not require something like stylelint to keep you from hurting yourself.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#228Gray beard's 5c: Tailwind is a farce and a catastrophe. It's as modern as the style parameter is, and it's as reusable as a moving a dirt pile from one corner to the next. You're not learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind. Learn CSS, that will stick with you for the next 20 years. It amuses me when a library is implemented 'with tailwind', which means it's totally useless to the people _not using tailwind_,…
Are there any CSS frameworks you like instead? Or just raw CSS?
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#229Gray beard's 5c: Tailwind is a farce and a catastrophe. It's as modern as the style parameter is, and it's as reusable as a moving a dirt pile from one corner to the next. You're not learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind. Learn CSS, that will stick with you for the next 20 years. It amuses me when a library is implemented 'with tailwind', which means it's totally useless to the people _not using tailwind_,…
+1. Let's say things how they are: Tailwind is a small catastrophe from an implementation, performance and maintenance point of views. It got few things quite well in being a more modern bootstrap, had a stellar marketing and it's color palettes are really well done and leagues above the default material ones. ...that being said... Tailwind's biggest pro is that it allows people that _don't_ know css that much to sty…
I think Tailwind could be made good for usage at enterprise scale, for example, as a customisable foundation for a branded design system.
If for example Figma offered first-class support for Tailwind-like utility classes in the form of a modernised "styles" or "composite tokens" feature, then mapping from a design system to Tailwind-based code could be pretty simple.
But right now, it's anything but. In my experience, designers simply aren't aware of the Tailwind structure, and it's hell trying to map their mental model onto Tailwind. Figma is built to design things that map easily to CSS at the attribute level, not the class level.
Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should anyone care about adding third party tech? This argument boils down to: “But you don’t need Tailwind for that. You can do more work for a (almost certainly) worse result with a designsystem.css!” Sure you can! Why?
(Almost certainly) worse? Haha. Why would it be? If you really want to, you can even use Tailwind's naming for you language file. The thing is, you add complexity to do a job that could be done in the same way without adding complexity and dependencies. Shouldn't we try to justify added complexity through added value?
> why would it be?
Because most frontend engineers cannot make something as visually appealing as Tailwind’s defaults and most designers cannot make frontend abstractions as ergonomic as Tailwind’s.
Now it seems like you’re suggesting just reimplementing Tailwind? Or yes you can have one of your FE engineers and one designer try to dream up your own Tailwind but again: why? Now you’re consuming two people for something that can be achieved by literally zero people and “yarn add tailwind.”
It is not at all my objective to “reduce complexity” that sits behind good abstractions. My goal is to ship product and to put as much complexity as possible behind good abstractions and ideally out of my team’s maintenance burden and Tailwind helps achieve all of those.
Sure, if Tailwind provided literally zero value I would say you shouldn’t add it to the codebase. But it provides a huge amount of time-value (the best kind!) in my experience, so “there’s a package from the internet” is hardly a consideration whatsoever.