Tailwind has been great and I've been looking forward to this for months. I fought Tailwind as a concept pretty hard at first, but after hearing Adam and a few others raving about it I gave it a shot. It takes some getting used to at first but I can't imagine developing without it anymore. To me, the biggest benefit of Tailwind and utility classes in general is that it removes the cognitive overheard of having to thi…
How is that any different from setting CSS in the style attribute of your tag? What happens when you need to update all the "text-sm text-gray-700" to something else? Seems like a step backwards at worst and identical to Bootstrap/Foundation at best. Everyone provides class primitives like that What you're describing offends separation-of-concerns
You update it in the one place (template/render function/component/helper/view/partial) that you wrote it.
> What you're describing offends separation-of-concerns
The entire HTML/HTTP/CSS/Javascript web schmozzle offends separation of concerns and is shot through with layering violations and dependence on the specific rather than on abstractions.
Tailwind responds to that particular shitshow by refactoring style at the point of HTML generation, which (particularly in a template-driven world) makes a crapload more sense than trying to build higher-order style abstractions in a language that was explicitly intended to not be Turing complete.
If the HTML ERB had chosen DSSSL instead of CSS, we wouldn't need this.
When it comes to developer productivity and happiness, composition beats inheritance, even in declarative paradigms.