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Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

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Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#81
post #75

Read some of the Getting Started documentation, for fun. First step: > Installing with Vite What the hell is Vite? Oh, it seems to be something you need to install via npm. I cannot help but to ask - why do we require npm, or Vite, for something that looks like it should "help" with CSS? Why is the webdev such a shitshow, that seems to get ever deeper into its own weird rabbit hole?

Webdev is a shitshow so investors money could burn quicker. Huge potential for companies that can come in and transform the stack by throwing away the whole "modern" JS stack and use things like Turbo or LiveView

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Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#82
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t work on the frontend very often, I think the last time I did so was when bootstrap was “the tailwind”, but when I recently had to cover for one of our react developers I got to work with it. I genuinely didn’t think there was a difference in my work flow between the two. Looking up meta language magic in the official documentation and then using it through brute-force development. Maybe I’m missing something,…

Bootstrap is so much worse because of all the nested CSS styles. One of the big benefits of utility classes is that they’re relatively isolated to one element (with a few exceptions like tailwind’s group classes). This has a lot of benefits like eliminating spooky action at a distance and making elements so independent they can just be copy pasted between Tailwind projects. If you’re brute forcing Tailwind then you n…

Probably, I’m just sharing how it feels to use it when you work on frontend once a year.

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#83
post #75

Read some of the Getting Started documentation, for fun. First step: > Installing with Vite What the hell is Vite? Oh, it seems to be something you need to install via npm. I cannot help but to ask - why do we require npm, or Vite, for something that looks like it should "help" with CSS? Why is the webdev such a shitshow, that seems to get ever deeper into its own weird rabbit hole?

Webdev is a shitshow so investors money could burn quicker. Huge potential for companies that can come in and transform the stack by throwing away the whole "modern" JS stack and use things like Turbo or LiveView

This is such a biased take. There's many ways to build a website, you just don't like the most popular way because you're not comfortable with the technology and ethos.

That's ok, but don't go around spouting nonsense about about investors throwing their money away on js projects.

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good rant! That's kind of what web-development seems like sometimes. Almost every part of the technology stack is there to fix some other part of the stack that never was ideal to begin with. TypeScript being the best example. It only exists because JavaScript sucks, and JavaScript only ever existed because in 1994ish some guy failed to get Java to run in the browser, and the only reason we're building apps in what w…

no, it's not a good rant. this is the billionth "web dev is too complicated!" rant that is present under every. single. thread. about any technology vaguely related to front end development.

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Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#86
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good rant! That's kind of what web-development seems like sometimes. Almost every part of the technology stack is there to fix some other part of the stack that never was ideal to begin with. TypeScript being the best example. It only exists because JavaScript sucks, and JavaScript only ever existed because in 1994ish some guy failed to get Java to run in the browser, and the only reason we're building apps in what w…

no, it's not a good rant. this is the billionth "web dev is too complicated!" rant that is present under every. single. thread. about any technology vaguely related to front end development.

This site leans heavily backend it seems. There's a strain of patent smugness that comes with a lot of comments about frontend on this site and it's quite disheartening to see it.

You rarely see frontend devs disparaging backend devs for their tech choices.

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#87
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given its popularity this can actually get into measurable carbon emission savings. Not world changing. But maybe a few international flights over the lifespan.

The carbon cost of a bloated CSS framework isn't the build time, it's the billions of times the resulting CSS has to be parsed and applied on the web pages where it's used.

Have you examined the build artifacts of a site using tailwind? The size of the CSS is often smaller than the same styling in "normal" hand written CSS. There are a dozen blog posts from large engineering orgs that have confirmed that switching to Tailwind slimmed their builds down. Shopify has been a big proponent of Tailwind and they are absolutely obsessed with shipping as little code as possible because of the scale they operate at.

Also, browsers are insanely good at parsing and applying CSS. You need hundreds of thousands of unique selectors before the browser takes more than fraction of a second to parse and render an entire CSS file.

https://www.trysmudford.com/blog/i-spent-a-day-making-the-we...

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#88
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carbon cost of a bloated CSS framework isn't the build time, it's the billions of times the resulting CSS has to be parsed and applied on the web pages where it's used.

Have you examined the build artifacts of a site using tailwind? The size of the CSS is often smaller than the same styling in "normal" hand written CSS. There are a dozen blog posts from large engineering orgs that have confirmed that switching to Tailwind slimmed their builds down. Shopify has been a big proponent of Tailwind and they are absolutely obsessed with shipping as little code as possible because of the sc…

Yes, I have. I work on browser CSS performance.

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#89
post #48

Read some of the Getting Started documentation, for fun. First step: > Installing with Vite What the hell is Vite? Oh, it seems to be something you need to install via npm. I cannot help but to ask - why do we require npm, or Vite, for something that looks like it should "help" with CSS? Why is the webdev such a shitshow, that seems to get ever deeper into its own weird rabbit hole?

Generally use the standalone tailwind CSS CLI tool for keeping things lean. Sadly the download link from the "Getting Started" page https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/releases/tag/v4.... is broken. Shows that the "bloated" way of doing things is now the norm.

This is a feature for projects already using Node and Vite (which is quite popular these days).

It's also not a requirement. The binary still exists, you can run it standalone.

Re: Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

#90

Read some of the Getting Started documentation, for fun. First step: > Installing with Vite What the hell is Vite? Oh, it seems to be something you need to install via npm. I cannot help but to ask - why do we require npm, or Vite, for something that looks like it should "help" with CSS? Why is the webdev such a shitshow, that seems to get ever deeper into its own weird rabbit hole?

While I don't disagree (broadly speaking) with you about the complexity of webdev, it looks like you don't have a full understanding of what Tailwind is:

a (CSS) code generator.

It happens to be written in JS so it can be integrated as part of existing build steps or bundling. That's the rationale behind it. :) It's build-time, not something client-side.

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