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

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

jvns.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 435 posts

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#31

Post by chistev »

JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#32

Post by aejm »

bryanhogan wrote: post #28

I have been writing a "clean" web development guide focusing on writing HTML and CSS that scales well: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/ Maybe it's useful for people here. I don't use Tailwind or similar for styling, just CSS with modern frameworks like Astro or Svelte. For every project I have the following CSS files: - reset.css - var.css - global.css - util.css Other styling is scoped to that specific component or la…

Using a JavaScript framework kind of defeats the whole purpose doesn’t it?

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#33

Post by reaperducer »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.

This is precisely how I do it.

Code that generates HTML. Once I can see all the content on the screen in some kind of Netscape Navigator 1.0 nightmare, then I go back and add styles to make it look pretty.

It's not hard. It just requires thought and planning.

(The best planning tool I've found is a pencil and grid paper, not the web design SaaS-of-the-moment. However, it's surprisingly hard to find good pencil sharpeners these days.)

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#34

Post by esafak »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #10

For me Svelte and LLM completely removed my need for Tailwind. Turns out I was using it primarily to avoid CSS collision, and (to me) more logical syntax, rather than the self-imposed constraints.

Why did Svelte affect your stance towards Tailwind?

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#35

Post by reaperducer »

freedomben wrote: post #4
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

You're not wrong, and I mostly agree with you. I die inside when I see the div soup that a lot of sites have become. However, I think there is value in being able to have the important parts of CSS merged into the HTML a bit. Where that line is, is certainly up for debate (and I don't have the answer), but I've found a lot of my tailwind sites are more readable to me than my pre-tailwind sites, often because I don't…

I don't have to context-switch and open a different file to be able to reason about the styling on an element

Unless you're coding on a VT100 terminal, you just put the HTML in one window and the CSS in another. Subdivide as necessary, or as your monitor space allows.

Heck, we were doing that back in 1989 on IBM PCs with MDA displays.

If your CSS is so out of control that you can't wrap your brain around it, it's time to refactor or split into individual CSS component files.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#36

Post by flossly »

reaperducer wrote: post #26
flossly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Tailwind and have all kinds of "screen reader" directives in my templates. Not sure if it helps, but if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them. It seems that Tailwind is now blamed for the mess that is HTML/CSS. Tailwind certainly allows for accessible designs; it may not be the ideal solution, sure, but what we aim for is "good enough".

if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them. Not good enough. You have to be accessible before it is needed in order to avoid legal liability. And how do you expect to get a blind user if they already cannot use your product? None of the doctors I build web sites for are currently blind. I know this because I talk to them regularly. But I still build the web sites fo…

You call it lazy. I call it "focus" or avoiding pre-mature optimization.

I find the "legal liability" claim hilarious... I do better than 95% of the web: as I said I HAVE some screen reader directives (just did not test it), and labels to make the app more accessible.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#37

Post by JimDabell »

chistev wrote: post #31
JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

> Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase?

No, I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#38

Post by reaperducer »

chistev wrote: post #31
JimDabell wrote: post #27

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level” . It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwin…

Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

I think that was true at the beginning. But Tailwind is quickly approaching the multi-headed hydra it was trying to replace.

Re: Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

#39

Post by efortis »

vehemenz wrote: post #15
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #3

> I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like. I've been teaching semantic HTML / accessible markup for a long time, and have worked extensively on sites and apps designed for screen readers. The biggest problem with Tailwind is that it inverts the order that you should be thinking about HTML and CSS. HTML is marking up the meaning of the document. You should start there. Then style with CSS.…

A few counterpoints: Treating markup and styles separately is great, in principle, but you'll always need additional markup for certain things. We knew this going back to the early 2000s. There is nothing about Tailwind itself that forces you to use divs and spans instead of the appropriate HTML tag. Documents and interfaces are different. Tailwind makes a lot more sense for interfaces. You can use Tailwind for the i…

Benchmarks?
Post reply on HN