Tailwind Isn't for Me
spicyweb.dev
Tailwind Isn't for Me
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Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#2Especially in the HTMX community I'm alwayws wondering why people are chosing Tailwind. I tried it too and had the same problems as stated in the article.
Mainly that its polluting the HTML so much. I went the opposite route and am using PicoCSS now which works with semantic tags and can even work without any classes. Feels much cleaner
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#3As someone who used to make websites in the myspace days (and has about that much experience with web dev, plus a few static client sites from high school), I gave tailwind a try for my most recent project. I think it saves me a bit of time, and it's easier to get a decent aesthetic quickly. That said, I don't feel it's strictly necessary, and I don't like the HTML bloating either. It makes me want to create classes, at which point it wouldn't be necessary to use tailwind anymore.
The author says this about using @apply:
> Therefore, it’s simply the truth that CSS files built for Tailwind are non-standard (aka proprietary) and fundamentally incompatible with all other CSS frameworks and tooling. Once you go Tailwind, you can never leave.
How true is this? At worst you could use your output.css and at best I'd expect an automated tool that could do this conversion.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#4This from 2021. No criticism, it is a good post. I was just confused at first and only realized it when I came about the part mentioning the JIT.
This is a hill I will die on: Blog posts should have a date at the top.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#5I 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."
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#6If you have tendinitis/RSI/carpal tunnel I cannot stress enough how much worse it feels writing tailwind versus regular css.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#7I'd actually love a tool that converts tailwind CSS to regular CSS on save because my biggest issue with CSS is that I constantly have to come up with ids and class names.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#8People 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 html+css+js) and most go for the next painkiller on the market.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#9Yeah, it isn't Tailwind that doesn't support web components. It's Shadow DOM that is such a bad abstraction that it breaks the web in innumerable ways and need dozens of new standards to fix its shortcomings.[1]
And yeah. That that is seemingly not an eyesore? It's not because Tailwind is bad and "pollutes HTML". It's because web components hide any and all ugliness from you so that you can pretend they are beautiful.
Because in the end there's literally nothing on the web but divs and spans
[1] From web component report by people making them: https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html
It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM. We urge browser vendors to recognize these barriers and work to make Shadow DOM more usable by more developers.
Re: Tailwind Isn't for Me
#10I 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 as well as vertically, so I'm all good on most peoples major complaint.