Web Development

I spent the last week learning and then writing technical docs on tailwind for my org. I was skeptical of it at first, now I have an informed dislike of it.

Tailwind feels like CSS i have to re-learn. It's maybe slightly easier? mostly it just makes my html unreadable to the point i barely know what's going in anymore. I don't do much frontend stuff but i'm gonna go back to plain old CSS for my next project. It all sounds good in theory, but in practice, tailwind has been more work rather than less. I feel like i put a fair amount of time in understanding how everything works too.

It just really feels like one of those things that makes little difference but i wasted way roo much time on trying to give it it's fair chance.

The primary CSS is inlined on the HTML page so that all the assets for the first viewport are fetched in the initial request.

It's funny, with HTTP 2, one can go back to just putting the style element back into <head/> where it belongs and gets the same exact behavior.

A lot of comments seem to think that Tailwind is just a way to save a few keystrokes at the expense of legibility and leanness.

For me, the value comes from not having to jump all over a codebase, not having to name so many things, having clearer scopes and pulling things like colors and spacings from a central config.

I know there's a hundred different ways to solve those issues that wouldn't offend CSS purists but ask 10 different people and you'll get 10 different answers with 10 different caveats.

So I use Tailwind to write fuckugly markup in a faster, easily iterated way that will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows Tailwind.

This person thinks Tailwind is just a grift to make money, prioritizes separations of concerns over all else (I contend they have SoC brain-worms, but I don’t want to get too spicy), and ignores all the actual arguments people use for Tailwind, like how it’s specifically built to suit component frameworks over someone raw-dogging that HTML and CSS. Their argument boils down to “get good” which is the argument that folks use when they’ve never been on a team and have never had to make actual trade-offs.

Having used it in a major project its a shame that its so inefficient because the user experience really is much much better. It feels like a successor language to CSS because it fixed lots of unobvious and badly named attributes and makes lots of things just easier.

The code is more verbose but also you can completely understand how the page will look just by reading the html.

That said it makes sense the performance is so much worse, where you would have matched on one class for N styles you now match on N classes for N styles.

Theoretically its totally possible to do that matching at compile time and 'compile' the string of classes you wrote into individual ones per element for each combination used in the html though.

Why the editorialized title? Why not use the one from the article?

I maintain that tailwind is still an anti pattern. Things like stylex are the way forward for component based systems, I feel.

I loathe Tailwind. It offers absolutely nothing in advantage over plain CSS other than possibly development speed (but not re-development speed). I realise it's meant for frameworks rather than smaller sites but at some point you know someone is going to have to hands on edit that mess.