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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#291

Post by keithnz »

fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

I used to use tailwind a lot, but AI has made it redundant largely. There's zero reason to add any library into your stack unless it has significant advantages, tailwinds advantage was largely a developer convenience, and that's not really needed anymore. You can now maintain a design system in CSS really easily and ensure your UI conforms to it using AI tools in a way that seems way more powerful than before.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#292

Post by dzonga »

dlisboa wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #6

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.…

I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If i…

I agree. things like tailwind etc should come out as by-products of products making money.

react was not facebook's product. rails was not 37signal's product. Kubernetes was not google's product.

blaming AI is not facing the reality of how tech products / open source is financed in our industry.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#293

Post by vehemenz »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #129

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, fro…

These are the same anti-Tailwind arguments that have been circulating forever.

If you want to build a case against Tailwind that's actually compelling, you should start by understanding what it is first. Only then can you compare it to other frameworks and methodologies.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#294

Post by vehemenz »

n738 wrote: post #245
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #129

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, fro…

Precisely this.

Do you have an argument, or are you coasting on the "trust me bro" vibes of the parent?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#295

Post by 4dd3 »

echelon wrote: post #261
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering? Why shouldn't that exist? The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an…

Humanity evolves. We wouldn't need doctors if we had a box you could walk into that cured all ailments. We won't need software engineers once you can crudely specify requirements and have a machine turn them into rigid requirements with a solid data model, flexibility to extend, infrastructure to run, and monitoring and recovery to maintain reliability. A lot of things change when technology evolves.

lol what a load of nonsense.

im not swe by trade, in fact I would love it if what you said was true because I could consolidate various kinds of businesses into one holistic infrastructure and demolish all the competitors.

Aint happening tho!

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#296

Post by vlyan »

00ze wrote: post #97
atonse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

"The market" for Tailwind only existed due to ignorance and obfuscation fueled by hype for web dev jobs. Completely artificial market built on propaganda and low interest rate money printing. Same as the rest of SaaS. Nothing about the tech industry since the '08 crash has been organic investment. Was 100% collusion between government and private interests to manipulate public opinion. > They've just got to do the ne…

this. leftpad as a service bullshit SaaS companies somehow raising millions was a temporary insanity driven by ZIRP and incestuous VC money currents. we see the same thing happening now with companies whose products are paper-thin vibecoded wrappers over someone else's models.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#297

Post by BrandoElFollito »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #240
stephbook wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, I try all the time. But HTML and CSS are not made for the modern web. Styling radio buttons, working date inputs, forms that POST automatically, typeahead and server-side validation (eg username already taken.) You spend all your time reinventing the wheel and then it's buggy and looks like a dog. To say nothing of the inevitable poly fills and Cross-Browser issues.

I have not run into cross-browser differences in a long time. That is differences, that actually mattered and for which I would have had to build any workaround. I have built several websites recently, using vanilla HTML and CSS and solved everything using server-side rendering. What problems specifically do you see with server-side rendering?

From a security perspective I greatly prefer a client-server approach: you have an unsafe frontend where you care about ergonomy and aesthetics, and a backend which provides an API which handles the security.

Two different worlds and often two different kinds of developpers

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#298

Post by vlyan »

gherkinnn wrote: post #168
benoau wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it die? How would it die? The vast majority of Tailwind is literally just shorthand for individual CSS properties.

Because what makes it useful , like media queries, can't be put in style attributes. Frankly this whole discussion is just as silly as claiming flex has nothing over table layout.

flex is not a collection of aliases for s and s

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#299

Post by vehemenz »

fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

What do you mean by vanilla CSS?

I can't be the only one who has no idea what this means. Do you mean high-abstraction classes that are bound to the DOM arbitrarily, and are difficult to change later? We've had 25+ years to see how that doesn't scale.

Do you mean Tailwind-style functional CSS written by hand? What would be the point of that?

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#300

Post by vehemenz »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #53
fg137 wrote: post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.

I don't really get this argument. 90% of Tailwind is shorthand for existing CSS properties. There's really not much to learn if you already know CSS.
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