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Tailwind Isn't for Me

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Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#51

Post by PrimeMcFly »

SebastianKra wrote: post #45

Decent arguments. Ultimately, I think your preference comes down to: - Do you care about how your html output looks? - I personally don't, just like I don't care about what my Webpack bundle looks like. Web standards will always be slower to evolve, which is why we build tooling on top. - How do you think web components will be used? - I believe they will be used sparsely, only by libraries. But if you want to replac…

> Web standards will always be slower, which is why we build tooling on top.

I don't follow. I don't see how frameworks or tools have anything to do with standards being slow.

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#52

Post by PrimeMcFly »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #10

I love tailwind. I strongly feel that most modern CSS solutions are massively overthought. In engineering we have bigger problems to solve than a key/value list that makes a div blue. Tailwind removes the thinking around CSS, naming, preprocessors etc etc, it just lets me write good CSS and focus on components and other engineering problems. I seem to be one of the few people who can read CSS properties horizontally…

> read CSS properties horizontally as well as vertically,

What do you mean by this?

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#53

Post by seer »

TekMol wrote: post #8

People want painkillers, not vitamins. That's why there is this endless flow of snake oil frameworks like Tailwind and all the others. People see some fancy demos and think "wow, so cool so easy" and "This is the newest framework, so it must be the best" and go for it. Then over time, they get caught in a web of problems that the complexity of the framework produces. Then a few people go for the vitamins route (plain…

Hmm, I’ve always considered tailwind like the spice to make css actually usable, kinda like elixir is to erlang, typescript is to javascript or C is to machine code. Its still CSS just the stuff that you _actually_ want to build is pre-packaged and thought out for the use case.

And I’m not dissing on CSS - just those tools try to solve different problems.

CSS is the ground truth, and it kinda has to support all the weird edge cases and uses that tailwind doesn’t.

Tailwind is like usability overhaul of css, but still allows you to “drop down to css” everywhere you want to.

It can compose like css, but it also constraints you to what you can do. It also gives you tools to group, adjust, refine styles, but in a usable way.

It’s a transpiled language on top of css, but more ambiguous than sass or less.

Given enough time most projects I work with slowly gravitate towards small composable utility classes anyway, tailwind is just logical evolution of that.

And since design peojects usually gravitate towards design systems in the long run, tailwind is really good at facilitating that.

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#54

Post by troupo »

ellinoora wrote: post #29
PUSH_AX wrote: post #10

I love tailwind. I strongly feel that most modern CSS solutions are massively overthought. In engineering we have bigger problems to solve than a key/value list that makes a div blue. Tailwind removes the thinking around CSS, naming, preprocessors etc etc, it just lets me write good CSS and focus on components and other engineering problems. I seem to be one of the few people who can read CSS properties horizontally…

My biggest issue with Tailwind is point #5 on the article: Tailwind encourages div/span-tag soup. Together with the class name soup my HTML becomes unreadable.

How does Tailwind encourage div/span tag soup compared to anything else? You literally cannot do anything on the web without a div/tag soup

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#55

Post by mablopoule »

tipiirai wrote: post #37

I'm with the author. I love vanilla CSS. With a well-thought, cascading structure you get the benefits of both global and local CSS.

Exactly. I had the luck of working with a codebase that knew how to harvest the power of vanilla CSS (though vanilla CSS in 2020 was already the same as vanilla CSS in 2014), and it's quite powerful. Add to that the browser devtools and it can be very productive.

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#56

Post by eithed »

patatino wrote: post #5

I feel the same about javascript: "I think the folks building Tailwind are talented and nice people. But at a pure technical level, I simply don't like Tailwind. Whoever it was built for, it was not built for me."

What would you suggest as an alternative to enable rich web applications?

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#57

Post by dbbk »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #35
dbbk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Styled Components? I've been using them for years now and I'm extremely productive. Tailwind on the other hand looks like a hellish nightmare, horizontal reading, proprietary syntax, no selector targeting of other components.

My personal opinion is that styled components creates an unnecessary and fuzzy extra abstraction on top of components.

Not really? It's just an element with some attached styles.

styled.div`color:red` is a red-colored div. Hardly fuzzy.

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#58

Post by jamiedumont »

TekMol wrote: post #8

People want painkillers, not vitamins. That's why there is this endless flow of snake oil frameworks like Tailwind and all the others. People see some fancy demos and think "wow, so cool so easy" and "This is the newest framework, so it must be the best" and go for it. Then over time, they get caught in a web of problems that the complexity of the framework produces. Then a few people go for the vitamins route (plain…

I was going reply at the top-level because my opinion is vastly different to the majority of comments so far, until I found yours. Years ago I very much enjoyed finding painkillers to make my work easier. I now only take vitamins.

I'm very much in agreement with the author (regarding Tailwind, I'm Web Component-curious but yet to be convinced to the degree is obviously is...). I started with Adam Morse's "Tachyons" library which is the pre-cursor to Tailwind. Conceptually that worked for me, particularly because I was all-in on the JS ecosystem, building a startup with React and Meteor (story for another time). I wrote up my thoughts on a now-extinct blog [1].

Over time though I found JS to be a fragile and brittle ecosystem to work in; I'm sure as many others have. I not only moved away from SPAs and JS as my backend language of choice to avoid npm dependency hell, but also any JS build tools because using the latter is functionally equivalent to the former.

When my choice of language/framework at the time (Elixir & Phoenix) added support for Tailwind by default, without a JS build tool (handled by an Elixir lib) I was conflicted. I had gotten used to vanilla CSS again with all the new additions such as custom properties and wasn't convinced I needed Tailwind. Even though it didn't bring the JS build chain I hated, it still represented a hard dependency to replace down the line if required, and still required a build tool. It was potentially a decision future me would regret. These days I'm all about not snookering future-me.

I think Tailwind has it's place where you're already using a build tool that can support it (JS or otherwise) and you're working in a team that needs a design system straight out of the box. It gets you up and running quickly (particularly with their TailwindUI components and themes) and provides a point of reference for everyone working on the project without coming up with a design/token system of your own. But that can be said of the older frameworks like Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation (remember that?!).

Personally I'm very happy writing HTML, CSS & JS without any build tools, bar a bit of templating to bring in partials here and there. Admittedly I'm working on very different websites now, but I spend years thinking that the foundations of the web needed augmenting and abstracting away (they probably did at that point...), but now I'm quite happy to work with it in it's natural state.

[1]: https://github.com/jamiedumont/personal_zola/blob/main/conte...

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#59

Post by ricardobeat »

9dev wrote: post #49
dbbk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Styled Components? I've been using them for years now and I'm extremely productive. Tailwind on the other hand looks like a hellish nightmare, horizontal reading, proprietary syntax, no selector targeting of other components.

If horizontal reading bothers you so much it resembles a hellish nightmare (Dante would like to have a word with you), nobody stops you from going like this: Submit And you actually can target other components. There are lots of sibling selectors, including named groups: Name

> removes the thinking around CSS, naming, preprocessors etc

Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me

#60

Post by omer_balyali »

rimliu wrote: post #22
nomilk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your analogy, wouldn't tailwind be more of a multivitamin, in that it contains a bunch CSS classes (vitamins) conveniently packaged and ready to go? I haven't used tw yet, but I intend to because I was blown away by how much sense the authors' book Refactoring UI made.

CSS classes in this case are microplastics, not vitamins.

That would make Tailwind a cocktail of micro-plastics, as utility classes are just regular css classes.
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