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Why Tailwind CSS Won

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#331

Post by sourcecodeplz »

Realistically speaking, with CSS, you don't even need to use one single class inside your HTML. Every element is a child of another, up till . The C in CSS is just that, CASCADING.

I find it ridiculous to attach so many classes to your HTML elements. I think it is obvious Tailwind gained popularity because people just didn't want to learn CSS. And I don't blame them, it took me years and I am still learning new ways to achieve things. In a way, CSS's flexibility is also its beauty: you can achieve the same thing multiple different ways.

You can do A LOT if you know CSS. With tailwind you can do what others have thought of you might need. This is the antithesis of programming. Programming is supposed to help you break the limitations of tools.

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#332

Post by hinkley »

blitz_skull wrote: post #267
keyle wrote: post #140

Gray 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_,…

Cool hot-take but it’s not true. You’re literally learning CSS when you learn tailwind. And no one (good) picks up a tool solely because it’s shiny, they pick it up because they find it has utility, which evidently LOTS of people do. And if you don’t think it’s reusable then you at least need to bring an argument for why that’s so because the docs, personal anecdote, and the opinion of LOTS of people is completely op…

> And no one (good) picks up a tool solely because it’s shiny

The amount of cargo culting going on right now is at an all time high. People do stuff all the time that makes no goddamned sense and is defended by, “well Google is doing it!” You are not Google and you never will be.

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#334

Post by doix »

danielvaughn wrote: post #320
yoav wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior Staff grey beard: Counterpoint: The C in CSS stands for Cascading. So you’re not learning CSS. You’re learning Tailwind specific classnames that expand to non-cascading style rules.

This is not true. There's no way to create a "non-cascading style rule" unless the style rule already doesn't cascade. You still have to understand the cascade in order to use Tailwind.

> You still have to understand the cascade in order to use Tailwind.

Can you expand? I haven't used Tailwind, but from looking at the docs, it looks like a short-hand syntax for writing inline styles. Not exactly the same since it can take advantage of media queries and other things that you can't do with inline styles, but close enough conceptually.

Where is the cascade with Tailwind? Perhaps I completely misunderstood how it works, but I would say that it feels like it's purposefully trying kill cascading.

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#335

Post by dartos »

epolanski wrote: post #276
xtian wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience mirrors yours 100%. What the parent comments seem to be describing are Tailwind in a context where people don’t know CSS that well. Yes, that will be a catastrophe. But so will SASS or vanilla CSS — even more so. Tailwind is a utility, not a replacement for fundamental knowledge.

On the other hand, people that know CSS very well will not need suddenly tailwind to get some utility classes.

“If you know then you can just make ” isn’t a great take

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#336

Post by afiori »

nottorp wrote: post #178
randomdigitz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve learned CSS, used Bootstrap, and tried a bunch of other tools. Tailwind ecosystem is the fast approach to building web UIs in my experience. It doesn’t matter if you know CSS or not. Nobody gains if you know CSS per se. People gain when you deliver finished projects. Tailwind helps ship projects faster.

As a user of web sites, this attitude leads to me paying for your fast shipping in electricity for CPU usage, extra money for extra RAM, plus wear and tear on my nerves because you do what your library allows you to do instead of something usable. Thank you.

Tailwind is not Styled Components, there is no dynamic component to it.

In that regard it is pretty similar to Sass.

The main effect on performance likely are bigger html documents (which can be optimized) and simpler CSS selectors.

In real world usage I would honestly guess that using simpler css selector (with far fewer propagating updates) is a net performance win.

(It was one of the showstopper for the :has pseudoclass, for a long time nobody knew of a way to implement it efficiently)

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#337

Post by harshitaneja »

ajanuary wrote: post #179
alex_suzuki wrote: post #125

I always felt slightly dirty after writing a bit of inline CSS (`style=”color: red“`) instead of a proper class, yet at the same time it accomplishes the goal and it was fast. So this is basically Tailwind, right?

One of the selling points that Tailwind pushes that I haven't seen other people mention here is that inline styles are _too_ flexible. You can do `style="color: red"`, but you can also do `style="color: #FE0005"` or `style="color: #FE1111"`. While tailwind lets you write your styles in the same _location_ as the style attribute, it allows you to restrict what _values_ you can use. You can set up a colour palette so t…

Can't this be solved by creating small css classes for your colour palette like font-color-primary, background-color-warn, etc? The benefit being that anyone who needs to include these only needs to think about the context and have consistency everywhere.

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#338

Post by ghc »

keyle wrote: post #140

Gray 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_,…

I've been using CSS since 1997. CSS was basically a shit show for its first 20 years thanks to all the slightly differing browser implementations. I will tell you, that is what stuck with me.

Tailwind is a massive improvement in terms of maintainability across teams and tooling. Thanks to Tailwind my team hasn't had to think about CSS resets and browser shims for over 5 years now, and any bugs where an application looks different in a particular browser can be forwarded to a team who will fix it, instead of us having to maintain an ever-growing pile of special rules and feature detection code.

There is, of course, no silver bullet, but for a team building applications from components with React or Vue, Tailwind is a maintainability dream compared to stylesheets, and easier to train new devs on too.

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#339

Post by [deleted] »

danielvaughn wrote: post #320
yoav wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior Staff grey beard: Counterpoint: The C in CSS stands for Cascading. So you’re not learning CSS. You’re learning Tailwind specific classnames that expand to non-cascading style rules.

This is not true. There's no way to create a "non-cascading style rule" unless the style rule already doesn't cascade. You still have to understand the cascade in order to use Tailwind.

[deleted]

Re: Why Tailwind CSS Won

#340

Post by damethos »

lysecret wrote: post #244

Interesting the ration of upvotes to comments really gives you a good estimate of how controversial a topic is.

I was thinking the same. You do not see it in HN very often which makes me think I should avoid Tailwind for now since it's so controversial :)
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