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Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

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Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#71

Post by miragecraft »

This article ignores the fact that people actually used it and actually realized the benefits cited.

Traditional way of using CSS I feel is still advantageous for websites (instead of apps) with a limited set of highly reused styles.

Nowadays however there’s a general lack of restraint and self-control when it comes to web design, you must have a million variations of everything.

In that case utility-first CSS clearly wins because there’s almost no reuse except at the per-property level.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#72

Post by mmcnl »

M4v3R wrote: post #13

Like many I was initially skeptical of Tailwind because I thought it made the code look “ugly”. But then I started using and almost immediately noticed the productivity boost. Two things that I noticed while using it was 1) I never knew how much I disliked naming things before I didn’t need to do that anymore and 2) how big of a mental burden it was to keep the mapping between the id/classes and the CSS, not mentioni…

Dynamic class names can work if you use a configuration approach. https://tailwindcss.com/docs/content-configuration#dynamic-c...

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#73

Post by silentfrost »

earthnail wrote: post #14
moltar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s that different than just writing plain CSS?

Tailwind limits the scope of your rewrite problem to the element you want to change. No fears about side effects on other parts of the page.

Wouldn’t using @scope or CSS modules resolve that problem?

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#74

Post by sktrdie »

"At some point, hundreds of utilities later, the code you've written doesn't look pretty."

Personally I find diving through a bloat of identifiable tailwind classes allows me to review/change/adapt/create UI code MUCH QUICKER than having to re-learn some other abstraction or naming convention that some other developer came up with.

Complaining that lots of Tailwind classes "don't look pretty" makes me think the author has never worked on large projects/refactors using it.

To me Tailwind hits the perfect level of abstraction:

- not too low-level; allowing us to easily review/identify patterns in the code (p-0, leading-3, etc..)

- not too high-level; allowing us to not have to relearn a visual/naming pattern for every new project (.card, .button, etc..)

It boils down to being a search problem: how much of a language/DSL feature can I fit in my head? Reviewing a wall of CSS is harder for me to "search through". On the other hand a wall of Tailwind hits the right spot.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#75

Post by JLehtinen »

Being a designer who does his work inside code, Tailwind is a nightmare. I hand off my design files, the developers do their thing. But then, maybe I want to tweak things after a review, or the design system changes, so I have to do a sweeping change to those buttons. Now I need to touch dozens of jsx/tsx files around the platform and make humongous pull requests, and the result is often dozens of merge conflicts. If I only touched CSS/SASS files, there might not even always be a need to have the files reviewed.

Another problem is readability. When things aren’t getting named, the files are often unreadable at first glance. And that’s what they are to external services like Pendo, which rely on classes to tie their thing into the UI. Which are now susceptible to change on a very regular basis, because when you change Tailwind styles “that only changes that particular instance”, or so the story goes.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#76

Post by jonwinstanley »

tipiirai wrote: post #36
jonwinstanley wrote: post #16

I find it fascinating how Tailwind divides opinion.

[flagged]

Isn't the article linked to here also dishonest?

As in, the author compares a large box of complex styles to a single class attribute, without showing that to have the same function, those styles will also be written out in the CSS file. The contents of the CSS file should also be shown.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#77

Post by jonwinstanley »

unculture wrote: post #55
orangepanda wrote: post #9

Tailwind is write only, you’re not supposed to read it or maintain in. Want to change some property? Delete the entire class=“” attribute and start anew. Take that primary button example from the article - no one is claiming that it’s readable, especially when there are hundreds of primary buttons throughout the app, each with a slight variation. This works great for marketing or landing pages, or other use cases whe…

This is just demonstrably not true.

Agreed. I read and maintain tailwind every day. Rewriting it regularly would be highly unproductive.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#78

Post by jonwinstanley »

Pwntheon wrote: post #38
jacurtis wrote: post #17

I have no idea how tailwind has gotten so popular. Tailwind is a way to justify writing inline css in our HTML. This was once considered the cardinal sin of a frontend developer. You avoided inline-css at all costs. But now Tailwind just makes a class for text-color-blue which simply abstracts the `text-color: blue;` css property away into its own class. But don't fool yourself, you are just writing inline css by a d…

I have a hard time articulating exactly why, but I believe tailwind is popular because it allows developers who are not designers to ignore design/css best practices and just write inline styles again like they used to, before everyone starting telling them that this was bad practice. I had a rough road learning css, and have been in a few situations where my css/design skills were insufficient to the tasks I was exp…

Tailwind is popular because it works really well for a lot of people. It's not about marketing or people being tricked by marketing.

Sure - it's very different to the old way, and takes some getting used to, but a lot of people enjoy using it.

But also people can still build sites the old way if they wish - that's ok too.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#79

Post by bamboozled »

orangepanda wrote: post #9

Tailwind is write only, you’re not supposed to read it or maintain in. Want to change some property? Delete the entire class=“” attribute and start anew. Take that primary button example from the article - no one is claiming that it’s readable, especially when there are hundreds of primary buttons throughout the app, each with a slight variation. This works great for marketing or landing pages, or other use cases whe…

I modify it all the time so I'm not sure what you're on about.

I have a feeling people hate Tailwind for making CSS accessible to the masses.

Re: Tailwind CSS marketing and misinformation engine

#80

Post by bamboozled »

siva7 wrote: post #58

The popularity of tailwind isn't because of their marketing. Many colleagues using tailwind don't even care or have heard about the claims in your article. It's popular because it solves a real world problem for small to medium sites. It challenges "best practices" by showing that those in fact are just very opinionated and don't solve real world problems for many sites. I've witnessed over 2 decades of css evolution…

100% agree with this, I wouldn't have got anywhere near as far as I have with some of my side projects if I didn't have tailwind.
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