Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tailwind UI

tailwindui.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 367 posts

Re: Tailwind UI

#31

Post by larrywright »

chrshawkes wrote: post #25
larrywright wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly know assembler, C/Python/Ruby/Go is a waste of time. See how dumb that sounds?

Disagree. Dumb is doing the same thing over and over again and creating new tooling to do the same thing over and over but with added dependencies and frameworks. The fundamentals of web development have barely changed but the flavor of the month way of doing the same thing is constant.

HTML and css are way too low level to be productive in, in my opinion. Especially when dealing with wide ranges of screen sizes, browsers, and platforms. The only way I’m interested in touching the stuff is if there are tools to alleviate the pain.

Caveat: not a UI developer, I’ve mostly done backend work And DevOps for quite some time.

Re: Tailwind UI

#32

Post by XCSme »

I am still not convinced to make the switch to Tailwind from MaterialUI. Looking at the source code of the examples, it looks like a huge block of code with a lot of duplicate text/class names.

The HTML-CSS "separation" question will never have a "right" answer...

Re: Tailwind UI

#33

Post by efdee »

Judging from all the positive comments in this thread, clearly I must be missing something. This looks horrible to me. Instead of meaningful CSS classes you just get a bunch of small classes that do very small things, which you're supposed to combine until it looks like what you want. How is that better than writing your CSS manually?

(Again, I realise the failure is probably on me. But I don't get it.)

Re: Tailwind UI

#34

Post by zerkten »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #15

This does look very pretty. I want to use it. But is this just another template? What's to stop any site built on this from looking identical to other sites bootstrap style? What are the customization options on here?

There seem to be relatively few themes out there, but it seems the intent of Tailwind is that you are building a custom design. There is no reason these themes couldn't exist, but you'd also want custom some components to completely break away from the behavior of the ones supplied.

Your question is intriguing to me because I come from web development long before the Bootstrap was available. Teams I worked on would frequently take custom designs and turn them into clickable HTML templates with all UI components before spending a lot of time with the site itself. Bootstrap took this a lot further, but also enables the early parts of design to be skipped. You then have your issue with the site looking like a Bootstrap site.

My personal opinion is that Tailwind along with this new offering enables a better way out of that situation. Bootstrap is still known to more people and has less of a learning curve which are important points for some.

Re: Tailwind UI

#35

Post by yroc92 »

efdee wrote: post #33

Judging from all the positive comments in this thread, clearly I must be missing something. This looks horrible to me. Instead of meaningful CSS classes you just get a bunch of small classes that do very small things, which you're supposed to combine until it looks like what you want. How is that better than writing your CSS manually? (Again, I realise the failure is probably on me. But I don't get it.)

I’m with you there. It looks nice, but I don’t want to learn all that css.

Re: Tailwind UI

#36

Post by pcurve »

On the surface, the markup is pretty damn awful. But if you reach certain level of proficiency, this will definitely speed up development.

Back End Developer

Personally I would prefer Bootstrap over this approach.

Re: Tailwind UI

#37

Post by rjknight »

efdee wrote: post #33

Judging from all the positive comments in this thread, clearly I must be missing something. This looks horrible to me. Instead of meaningful CSS classes you just get a bunch of small classes that do very small things, which you're supposed to combine until it looks like what you want. How is that better than writing your CSS manually? (Again, I realise the failure is probably on me. But I don't get it.)

There are some nice aspects:

- The classes cover many common use-cases and, in some cases, present a simpler "API" than hand-rolled CSS would

- You can eyeball a HTML fragment and get a good idea of how the pieces fit together, compared to the normal approach of needing to work out what each individual class does, and then how they fit together. It's easy to remember what the Tailwind classes are doing.

- It's dumb, but the ability copy-and-paste entire HTML fragments from one place to another and have the styling "just work" is slightly mind-blowing

- Some CSS attributes work oddly depending on the order in which they are applied, or the order of the composition of classes that both attempt to apply the same attribute, and that problem goes away with Tailwind

There are other advantages, but these were all quite surprising to me, because my expectations of CSS have always been quite low.

Re: Tailwind UI

#38

Post by todotask »

kareemm wrote: post #18

Looks sexy. But can someone ELI5 why I'd use Tailwind over e.g. a Bootstrap theme? Not trying to be snarky - genuinely trying to understand the advantages.

In addition to the other commenter, if you become more experience, you could roll your own Grid, Flexbox and some utility (like Tachyons CSS) styles.

Utility CSS allows you to change or customize far more flexible in a fast pace environment than Bootstrap.

If you prefer lighter CSS, Tachyons is another option which I found more easier to read even if I have a long classes.

Re: Tailwind UI

#39

Post by iudqnolq »

efdee wrote: post #33

Judging from all the positive comments in this thread, clearly I must be missing something. This looks horrible to me. Instead of meaningful CSS classes you just get a bunch of small classes that do very small things, which you're supposed to combine until it looks like what you want. How is that better than writing your CSS manually? (Again, I realise the failure is probably on me. But I don't get it.)

Their argument is that the idea of separating content from presentation was always a lie, and that your JS, CSS, and HTML code is always intertwined. I've found this to be partly true for web apps.

Tailwind is essentially unusable without a build step. You can configure it to make composite classes for common styles (button, card, etc.), but if you buy into their philosophy you'll probably want a component-based design (web components, React, Vue, etc).

It's better than working with CSS manually because you work at a slightly higher level. If it was transformed into a css-like language I would prefer that. As a non-UI expert, I also enjoy having an enumerable limited set of sane choices for most properties.

Re: Tailwind UI

#40

Post by aosaigh »

efdee wrote: post #33

Judging from all the positive comments in this thread, clearly I must be missing something. This looks horrible to me. Instead of meaningful CSS classes you just get a bunch of small classes that do very small things, which you're supposed to combine until it looks like what you want. How is that better than writing your CSS manually? (Again, I realise the failure is probably on me. But I don't get it.)

The same comment is at the top of every post related to Tailwind. Read this section in the docs and try it out before judging:

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/utility-first

The core principle is that you wrap up all UI elements into components. Most frontend and backend/template frameworks allow you to do this. You then verbosely apply the Tailwind classnames to perform styling, staying out of custom .css files all together.

Post reply on HN