Perhaps all the criticism over the years actually had an effect. Or maybe they finally arrived at good conclusions on their own. Either way, I suspect many of the pro/anti-Tailwind arguments are no longer relevant, and that's a Very Good Thing. Now we can get down to business and ship product.
It's highly amenable to human workflows as well. Of course, humans are more disparate than AIs so it doesn't suit all humans - no tool can. But it sure does seem like a majority of humans web developers like it.
I feel there are two issues with Tailwind for me as a designer / design engineer.
* First, JavaScript/Tailwind engineers have hijacked the conversation on design. Instead of "utility-first," "dead code elimination," and "type-safe CSS" I focus more on desing systems. Whether to use Perfect Fifth or Perfect Fourth in typography for example.
* Second, Tailwind makes it impossible for me to participate in the actual craft. Design decisions get buried in React components with cryptic expressions like `flex items-center shadow-lg p-6 hover:bg-gray-50 dark:bg-gray-800 py-[calc(theme(spacing[2.5])-1px)]`. This might make sense for JavaScript engineers, but blocks/makes it hard for systematic design. Instead of expressing precise mathematical relationships through CSS, we're essentially writing inline styles with better ergonomics.
Some thoughts about this topic, not necessarily in disagreement:
- Designers seldom think in the way you describe (explicit computer-readable rules, systems of design). A lot of designers are coming from crafts that are more implicit. It doesn't surprise me design business logic is not the topic of conversation.
- You need to update your tailwind classes to reflect your design business logic. Don't do "bg-gray", do "on-surface-emphasis" or whatever business logic. This is just a simple config change.
- You probably brought up modular scale as just one example, but modular type has become near myopic dogma of frontend engineers who haven't had any typesetting experience. A scale of 1.25 vs 1.5 is so in the weeds as to be useless. There are so many alternative ways to set type (e.g. take lessons from CJK typesetting) or innovate typography on the web (e.g. build your own leading-trim implementation!).
relative grid min-h-screen grid-cols-[1fr_2.5rem_auto_2.5rem_1fr] grid-rows-[1fr_1px_auto_1px_1fr] bg-white [--pattern-fg:var(--color-gray-950)]/5 dark:bg-gray-950 dark:[--pattern-fg:var(--color-white)]/10
Maybe the modern generation of web developers have IQ 200 and 20/20 vision with eidetic memory and I should just put myself to pasture.
The Tailwind classes are "unreadable crap", that's true, but it's not a problem because you don't "read" it, no one does. You roughly parse it and edit it.
Take a guess at what “dark:bg-gray-950”, “bg-white” or “min-h-screen” means. You get them from context.
Imagine if you put a little bit of effort into learning Tailwind. You’d get the more complex declarations as well.
As to why it’s better than a class declaration, a lot has been written about using atomic, composable utility classes over reams of “write-once” class declarations.
Tailwind is a tool for craftspeople, not artists. It democratises design by making it simpler. For folks that are really good designers, they should be happy that they can up their prices knowing that customers are paying for their expert eye, rather than just the basics again and again.
When I read the Tailwind book, my takeaway was their design philosophy was about the speed of iteration and how that interacts with designs whose parameters are too interdependent. Tailwind follows that philosophy by encouraging ad-hoc repeated edits over DRY. In that sense StyleX also fits the Tailwind philosophy very well even though StyleX is an even thinner layer over CSS.
Please explain how this is better than expressing typographic scales with CSS variables and calc()?
In talking with them, realized they just were bored with our theme, ha. Not publicly accessible though, sorry. I should probably recreate this.
You could opt to use style attributes directly within your HTML. Historically, we avoided this to maintain a separation of concerns, but it's puzzling why some prefer reintroducing similar methods. Is it just to save a few keystrokes? Using style attributes even seems more straightforward since it doesn't require translating code in your head.
I simply don't see the appeal.
- Pseudo-classes (e.g., :hover, :focus)
- Pseudo-elements (e.g., ::before, ::after)
- Media queries
- Keyframes and animations
And the DX in a larger project isn't great either.
On the other hand, this upcoming standard is a great addition for collocating styles https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope
<h1 class=hero>Cool page</h1>
<Hero>Cool page</Hero>
When it comes to defining the “stylistic detail” in either case, it has been separated from the “content” which is our page source file. I am happy to pay a build step to get better separation of concerns - content from presentation.
- Not having to name CSS classes
- Easier to read as it's inline with the rest of your HTML
- Standardised way of naming so that everywhere uses the same conventions
- Not having to manage a separate file and remove unused components
- Being able to use media queries, which I couldn't do in a style tag
- No risk of changing a class that is used elsewhere. CSS has global scoping which has its benefits but is risky.
> console.log(document.querySelectorAll("body > script").length)
27And then you ask "why not just have variable for each component, not each component's style?" and this is where tailwind steps in.
If there is only an alphabet soup, I no longer have a simple set of classes I can grep the codebase with to quickly find the relevant components.
I really don't think a big blob of text with a bunch of unnamed divs is easier to read.
The styles night be easier to find but they're absolutely not easier to read.
Most websites are maybe 20 components and localized pages. Not exactly that hard to name and keep constant. Can not think of names, just ask one of the AIs.
> - Easier to read as it's inline with the rest of your HTML
Only if you do a few styles. The moment you have mobile + desktop + dark/light you start to leave lines half a mile long.
> - Not having to manage a separate file and remove unused components
Counterpoint: Components/templates are still the same hell to manage.
> - Being able to use media queries, which I couldn't do in a style tag
CSS ... literally the bread and butter.
> - No risk of changing a class that is used elsewhere. CSS has global scoping which has its benefits but is risky.
Counterpoint: You will end up with styles that are applied to parts, then copied, forgotten to change, and then have a mix of styles that conflict with each other.
And you do not use global scoped CSS, but localized per page. All you need is local CSS + a single parent id/class and voila. Local scoped will not mess with global. Do not do stupid stuff like button { style style style }. No, make global scoped iButton, so you never run into the issue off having parental styles doing funny things to child styles.
Let me introduce our lord and savvier called Nested CSS + Named CSS tags ... Reusable, standardized, ...
Tailscale is frankly a solution for front end JS frameworks, and less for any server rendered html. Use local CSS for html pages that are really local. No need to make global CSS for price cards that you only use on one page. But if something is used over multiple pages, buttons, ... that is global. Simple, no?
Ironically, i am in the process of actually removing Tailscale everywhere because the recent 3 > 4 upgrade screwed so much up. What stayed good? My actual CSS nexted/tag components that i never.
That is one of the issues with frameworks in general, etc, things between versions can really mean a lot more work vs just having everything "basic".
I feel a lot of issue that people have with CSS are more related to not having a proper understanding about CSS, and ignoring some basics. Like do not style base tags. Use nested + custom naming tags, local css + a local id/css and you have no issue with overlap. Best of all, you gain the ability to make easier reusable components as your CSS are the components, not some JS/... whatever call you need to do to render something. It gets messy fast if your breadcrumbs is a components with items, and you need to change something later on. But if its a basic breadcrumbs{} css, adding feature is just a matter of adding naming.
Trust me, took me years to get out of this mindset (and it helped that CSS evolved a lot but most people do not even realize that CSS today != what they know/grew up with)
In bigger projects, if we start looking at the amount of files one has to deal with, Tailwind becomes very appealing. We've went through the regular `.css` route but then you have weird names, and, potentially, duplications or even conflicts. `css modules` is an option but you've now essentially duplicating the number of files that you have for each component / page. `sass` or `less` essentially bring the problems from `css modules` and regular `.css` into one.
I don't inherently like or dislike Tailwind (although I very much started by absolutely disliking it) but you feel its value in a project with 200+ files composed of components and pages
To me, this screams "CSS now can do everything we used to do ourselves, but let's keep pretending that we are still needed somehow"
Also inline css doesn't allow media queries, pseudo classes, etc., which is a big deal.
Much of it does, but not all of it.
I understand you're not a fan of Tailwind, so perhaps say what you dont like about Tailwind instead of creating a strawman and attacking it.
Also, shame on you for poo-pooing on someone else's open source project and people find useful.
> poo-pooing on someone else's open source project
This is not some young kid doing free software out of kindness. This is a company making millions of dollars in revenue in a closed source product (tailwind UI), which is built on a foundation (tailwindCSS) that is becoming less and less needed.
As someone who's done it both ways with web sites, that separation sucked. Having to figure out which style in my CSS file was messing things up was always a pain. And Tailwind tends to be "local" by default, limiting the damage done to other elements when I style an element.
In my larger experience (not just with web sites), whether separating content and presentation is a good idea varies widely from use case to use case.
I'm upgrading a personal Phoenix project to 1.7, and Phoenix now uses Tailwind by default. So I thought I'd try and update my one page thing to use it instead of Bootstrap.
So far, it looks like crap whereas the Bootstrap one looked 'good enough'.
What's the easiest way to get something that looks kinda sorta decent, with some nice defaults, without trying to become a designer?
Or should I just reinstall Bootstrap and be done with this.
That one.
Tailwind gives you tools when you want to control the design, but you’ve got to control the design.
When you just want something that looks good and don’t mind that bootstrap-y feel, bootstrap is the way to go.
(There are projects that essentially recreate bootstrap on top of tailwind, which, in theory, might give you something like bootstrap as a starting point with the power of tailwind, but I haven’t seen it work better in practice than just using bootstrap.)
Just get one of the tailwind UX kits and use their classes as your standard style guide. I personally use flowise as it’s free with paid more complex components if needed, but there are a bunch of others out there that fill the same space.
and here are the docs for DasiyUI: https://daisyui.com
"bg-indigo-600 px-4 py-3 text-center text-sm font-semibold inline-block text-white cursor-pointer uppercase transition duration-200 ease-in-out rounded-md hover:bg-indigo-700 focus-visible:outline-none focus-visible:ring-2 focus-visible:ring-indigo-600 focus-visible:ring-offset-2 active:scale-95"
Yeah, that's not making my life easier is it. Also some of those class names are super cryptic.
It'd be easier if you were using some source for UI components, I've used TailwindUI in the past, but that's paid. I'm sure there are good free alternatives.
I see people mention this issue fairly frequently, and it puzzles me a little. I have never once spent probably more than 1 second thinking about what to name something. Is it actually a blocker for some people? Are you really paralysed by this?
"When the menu is wide, the items' icons and text should be visible. When it's skinny, only the icons should be visible. This button toggles between them."
.menu {}
.menu--skinny {}
.menu--wide {}
.menu__icon {}
.menu__text {}You must be working with very good product owners then. The ones I've worked with love to specify the hell out of every possible detail. Like a web form is their personal HGTV renovation. I tried tailwind once and the classes ended up being an order of magnitude more than the markup. It got hard to read, quickly.
.btn-primary { @apply py-2 px-5 bg-violet-500 text-white font-semibold rounded-full shadow-md hover:bg-violet-700 focus:outline-none focus:ring focus:ring-violet-400 focus:ring-opacity-75; }
But their v3 docs seem to be very against this.
"Whatever you do, don’t use @apply just to make things look “cleaner”. Yes, HTML templates littered with Tailwind classes are kind of ugly. Making changes in a project that has tons of custom CSS is worse."
Reasons:
* You have to think up class names all the time — nothing will slow you down or drain your energy like coming up with a class name for something that doesn’t deserve to be named.
* You have to jump between multiple files to make changes — which is a way bigger workflow killer than you’d think before co-locating everything together.
* Changing styles is scarier — CSS is global, are you sure you can change the min-width value in that class without breaking something in another part of the site?
Yet... my experience using projects that use tailwind is that every button everywhere is styled the same way, but it's repeated in multiple areas. The 'kinda ugly' part, but also... it's repeated in multiple places. Trying to change the universal focus behaviour of buttons in a project like this is hard, because... I can't search focus:outline-none without finding everything that has 'focus:outline-none' on it. I can't just search/replace, because it'll impact other stuff.
So I end up spending way too much time trawling through way too many scattered specific styles all over a codebase, vs having a defined 'btn' style someplace. "well, that's just the project's fault"... possibly, but it seems to be the promoted/preferred/evangelized way of using tailwind, judging by the projects I've had to get involved with the past few years. IME, this approach may have good short term benefits, but poorer longer term maintenance, doubly so when the original people are no longer involved in the project, and outsiders have to come in to deal with it.
I generally only use @apply when there are some heavier external interactive libraries that are hard to style. Like for example if you're embedding markup in your application, and you need to apply a set of styles to the markup it generates, and you can't do that directly in react because you don't control that part.
Would a regex not work? Something like <button[^>]*?focus:outline-none
I'm very happy with my current CSS-in-JS workflow. Crafting good old css with LLM help. You just show the LLM a pic, ask for the components.... boom, done (with proper naming, etc)
If I am using a frontend framework and a build step, svelte and astro are nice depending on the use case. I can style with plain old CSS and rarely have to reach for class names, if you keep components small you can get away with element selectors and let the framework scope styles at build time.
I imagine its how parents might feel when they go to help their children with math homework only to find the math is now totally different from when they were in school and their methods (while still valid) for solving problems are no longer accepted by the school and their child is annoyed by having to reconcile the two systems...
I get the, tailwind works well in a team and scales nicely and you just have to use it, mentality. I've experienced it.
I still prefer a plain style sheets that targets elements by a class or tag (especially since CSS supports nested selectors!).
There is an issue in managing stylesheets, and for that I really like how Remix/React Router manages CSS where CSS flies are defined and applied at the route level. Where that isn't enough or dynamic styles are too complex for a .css file:
style={{...}}
CSS is so powerful, flexible, and extensible, tailwind feels like a limitation rather than an enhancement. I don't understand the continued appeal, but clearly many others do. I'm not sure why, but I am confident we'll all have moved on to something else in another 3 or 4 years too.
Tailwind is essentially just stenography for style={{…}} - a single utility takes 15 characters that would take multiple lines in a .css file or style object. It greatly reduces the amount of time I need to spend googling stuff like “visual text replacement css” or perusing various css cheat sheets or skimming through css-tricks blog posts from 8 years ago. Instead I always go to tailwind docs, and quickly learn the utility class that just does the thing I want. A surprising amount of it fits in my brain cache, much more than trying to cache the css for all the tasks I might need to do in a layout.
You could do this with just the css attribute, but that has the issue that everyone has always been taught it is wrong to do that, and a list of strings that contain a bunch of utility is easier than writing those plain CSS objects.
But why is it wrong to use the style attribute? What makes using tailwind to do the same thing "not wrong"?
Also this https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#us... and https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#st... look like reinventing the Cascading of CSS with an awful syntax.
The time people were taught it was wrong is thr time when all your elements were rendered on the server and the style was duplicated for every component it applied to.
Client rendered JS only sends it over the wire once and then duplicates it on the client.
Tailwind only allows a few options, so it’s less likely you have slightly different styles everywhere.
I think the awful syntax you talk about is really nice, since it covers 99% of everything I ever need to do with it. The cascading part of CSS is really cool, but 99% of the time it’s confusing when I don’t need it.
Although nowadays I'm sure they could technically do the same thing with the built in parsers without having to rely on just simple tokens.
On the other hand there are those posts on social media mixing multiplication and division and telling you there is only one true answer to those. Tailwind isn't that bad, but it's more into this direction for me as an old fart ;)
My project does not use (and I have no plans to include) npm, or PostCSS, etc.
To anyone else with the same question: See https://tailwindcss.com/blog/standalone-cli
Apparently I was just too blind to find it - here is how you can (presumably) use tailwind without pulling in npm and node.js.
Plus I couldn’t imagine developing without TypeScript and hot reloads in 2025.
If you don't want to use NPM, I can recommend Tailwind's standalone CLI
Didn't know there was one. Will look into it.
For the most part, Tailwind offers no more influence over style than normal CSS (okay, there's some exceptions... things like shadows are a bit more standardized, and indigo has gotten outside influence on color palettes as of late).
I like to think of it in the same way as Inter being the new Helvetica when it comes to choosing a font for a website: lots of people do it, and it looks great, so why not?
You just loaded the classes that you wanted (unless you didn’t download the source Sass files, but that would have been silly).
I've come to realize with design, like much creative work, the trends really do seem to be set by a shockingly small number of people. I wish more people realized this, because I feel there are talented individuals out there not making their own, thinking they'll never be heard. But I suspect some of those people would be unlocking new UI's for a large chunk of the web if they would give it a go.
It's an easy enough change to `npx @tailwindcss/cli` but we now have to go back and update all Apps and templates and since it uses v4 we now have to test every App to see if anything's broken with a v4 major release.
Given its massive install base, surprised they wouldn't maintain backward compatibility with v3 and have an explicit opt-in upgrade path to v4.
Edit:
v4 did actually break all our Tailwind Apps which doesn't support `@import "tailwindcss"`, likely because we use `npx tailwindcss` without any local npm dependencies. Trying to use the existing v3 `@tailwind components` renders a useless app.css. Only solution atm is to explicitly use v3 and change all our build scripts to use `npx tailwindcss@v3`.
Given it's a major version change, I'd expect it to create breaking changes, otherwise it would be a minor version change.
Then when you come back to that code later, you can confidently edit it without worrying about causing changes to other elements.
The cascading nature of CSS is still helpful, but I find that I usually want to limit my styling to just one element. For all the rest I go back to css but I wrote very little css because I usually just want to get the whitespace right.
there are helpers for that in the IDE (e.g., "Show Applied Styles for Tag" in Intellij) or even in chrome dev tools that show all this in a readable way. Tailwind snippets mentioned in this HN topic look kind of scary in comparison.
But overall it's a bit easier yes.
With Tailwind at least I know what to expect, and the code in practice rarely deviates from what it's supposed to look like.
I'm all for "not building up technical debt" and "thinking about things first" but in my personal experience the anti-Tailwind crowd doesn't have much to show here in this regard. Sure: it's theoretically possible to build a perfect CSS ivory tower, I just haven't seen even a passable one in a non-trivial project, it always devolves into a mess for various reasons... often breaking the rules of the paradigms like BEM and OOCSS, often because of cutting corners here and there.
Addendum: I'm all for criticising techniques, but it's interesting that the anti-Tailwind crowd always resorts to attacking the character of the developers that use it.
Which usually from people I know is they do know SQL and ORM and "no ORM crowd" doesn't have much to show.
Exactly the same with Tailwind, I see coworkers doing Tailwind and knowing CSS well and not being "pure vegan CSS developers".
But on the other hand we don't hire people who would utter such things like "no ORM" or "no framework" because those were also as in experience people who would create technical debt for others to deal with.
I don't know why, and perhaps in theory it should suck indeed! But in the end it just works.
Tailwind removes this burden and helps you focus on writing actual React components when needed.
Some breaking changes in there. May want to hold off on upgrading until LLMs come around to writing v4 code with ease.
In new projects, I will probably use Tailwind v4 and constantly provide the upgrade guide as context to an LLM. In existing projects, I will continue to use Tailwind v3 until I am certain that it works alongside the tools used by my framework (React Router / Remix).
I feel alright about it from a local perspective (I'm a lot more productive now than I was before), but I do wonder what it does to the overall dynamic and incentive to write shiny new things or generally update the ecosystem.
The LLMs will get more powerful, but to what extent will their work be dominated by existing tools (with lots of existent human-generated exemplar)?
There’s far less reason for humans to contribute code examples, answer questions, work on open-source projects, or even produce content knowing it’ll immediately be slurped up and resold.
Web dev will be stuck with React and Tailwind circa 2021 for a very long time.
"The way Tailwind scans your source code for classes is intentionally very simple — we don’t actually parse or execute any of your code in the language it’s written in, we just use regular expressions to extract every string that could possibly be a class name."
https://v3.tailwindcss.com/docs/content-configuration#class-...
The only difference in v4 is that scanning is so fast, they just scan roughly everything by default. You can still opt into manually specifying which files to scan.
https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil...
In one project, roughly 75% of the detections were false-positives, unnecessarily bloating the CSS.
https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil...
There's those that never used it for more than 30 minutes, that just tried it out or just skimmed through the docs. Those are the people that hate it and prefer "vanilla CSS" or similar.
Then there's the people that actually used it for a real project, within a team with more than 1 single person. Those are the people that understand its value, accept its trade offs and love it.
I've seen a lot of people jump from the first group to the second group. I've seen almost none jump from the second to the first.
That's why Tailwind is so successful.
It might not be beautiful in the eye of the purist, but it's absolutely fantastic in the eye of the builder and pragmatic.
I’m not against Tailwind, but I didn't used it yet because I struggle to see why it's a better approach compared to other options like Web Components or React Styled Components.
The biggest issue I have with Tailwind is how it clutters the HTML with a ton of utility classes making the HTML harder to read and maintain. Of course I see Tailwind being better than using large global CSS files with the classic CSS approach of naming html tags. But we do have ways where the CSS is scoped to a component without polluting the global namespace. Like Web Components and Styled Components. Both keep styles tied directly to the component (or more general, a specific group of html tags), making it easy to see which styles apply where.
And yes, with them there’s no need for global class names, without having to worry about unwanted side effects or clashes. If I remove a component, I also remove its associated styles without worrying about unused CSS being left behind since both are tied together. Plus, there’s no risk of one component's styles unintentionally affecting another (thanks to shadow DOMs).
I really value keeping HTML very short and readable by not mixing presentational styles directly in the markup. Tailwind’s approach, where the styling is all in the class attributes, makes the HTML feel cluttered, especially when you have long class lists on a single line, and GOD forbid you have actual class names to use there. It’s harder to understand what styles are applied at a glance since you cant even have it well indented, and it clearly reminds many reasons why we moved away from the inline style attribute in HTML in the first place. (Yes, we didn't left it for its limitations like pseudo classes and @media queries, they didn't even exist, we didn't add those new features because no one wanted to get back to those inline styling)
So, while I don’t hate Tailwind, I just don’t see the clear advantages over Web Components or Styled Components in terms of readability, maintainability, and separation of concerns, while I do have important unanswered important concerns about using it...
Yes, I've read the docs but never tried it out, I don't hate it, but I can't understand why I would choose it over other options. The fact of having a million classes in the middle of plain HTML makes them both unreadable for me.
And No, I don't like huge CSS files either, or the classic approach of using them. But it is hard for me to see why tailwind is a better approach than working with Web Components, or React with Styled components.
These two approaches allows me to not have to read presentational things in the middle of my html, and allow my html to be more clear and readable. I don't have to use CSS class names, it's easy to identify which CSS applies where, so, if you remove the component, you remove the CSS too, you don't end serving unused CSS rules. Each can have CSS not leaking to the global scope, and there is no risk on changing styles of another element...
So, there is no hate for me, but it is very hard for me to see the benefits of tailwind over these two approaches, and I really dislike the idea of having to read html elements with huge styling rules cluttering my html files, and worse, having all of them in a single line makin it hard to understand all the applied styling.
We left using style tag from HTML mostly for that reason, and not because of its current limitations (like not being able to use pseudo classes, media, etc)
> The biggest issue I have with Tailwind is how it clutters the HTML
You're 100% clearly in the first group. Maybe I shouldn't have said "hate" in that group, just people that don't like it or see its benefits.
> Like Web Components
That's a nice solution, but in practice as of today and relatively speaking: nobody is using them.
> and Styled Components
Except the performance is a lot worse. And you still have to come up with names for every single div that needs a minimal one line style.
And both of these solutions end up with huge CSS files. Huge CSS files are worse than having larger HTML markup, because CSS is a blocking resource and HTML is not.
> I really value keeping HTML very short and readable by not mixing presentational styles directly in the markup
People used to say this about React, they preferred their HTML separate from their JavaScript, all nice and clean. I'm now 150% sure you're in the first group.
> Yes, I've read the docs but never tried it out, I don't hate it, but I can't understand why I would choose it over other options. The fact of having a million classes in the middle of plain HTML makes them both unreadable for me.
Alright, now you've recognized it.
> These two approaches allows me to not have to read presentational things in the middle of my html, and allow my html to be more clear and readable.
That's a non issue. There are extensions that will just hide classnames. You're just blending your mind looking for reasosn to justify your "I don't like it".
I promise the day you use it in a real life project where you're working with > 3 other people you will understand it's benefits, and how having "large class lists" is a non-issue and a totally acceptable trade off over the practical benefits it provides. Both on performance of the resulting CSS and maintainability over a large period of time. And think in the insane amount of discussions you'll avoid regarding if we're calling this div "styledDivWrapper" or "WraperContent" or "CardWrapper" or ".card__item--dark". Not an issue if you work alone, but when working with others this becomes a real annoyance that tailwind completely removes.
Tailwind is not for your, don't use it.
Tailwind is not for purists and architecture philosophers.
Tailwind is for pragmatic people, working on real life projects within teams where they have to ship and spend less time philosophizing on the purity and beauty of things.
You shouldn’t need a special editor extension to get highlighting/autocomplete/etc, just use TypeScript and a CSS-in-TS solution.
THIS is the definition of a hack to me, so yeah.
Yes, this works with regular css too but it's the fact that you can do bigger changes inline quickly without making up a class (and god forbid you already have a different class affecting the same element and it gets hairy). Personally I think this is nice, it's great to immediately see results and then adjust. But dx is not the only thing that matters and there are tradeoffs too. Personally I would use tailwind for personal projects but I don't think I would try to introduce it at work.
I find it more magic to change a single class at root and have the entire design reflow (on purpose) -
Its beautifull when combined with shadowdom and wc
What I would really want is to be able to write tailwind css classes but then have it automatically turned into regular css that makes sense on save. I really don't like coming up with class names and such.
Congrats on the release.
There’s a risk of breaking changes in libs causing frustration in larger codebases, though. I’ve been working with LLMs in a Nextjs App Router codebase for about a year, and regularly struggle with models trained primarily on the older Pages Router. LLMs often produce incompatible or even mixed compatibility code. It really doesn’t matter which side of the fence your code is on, both are polluted by the other. More recent and more powerful models are getting better, but even SOTA reasoning models don’t totally solve this.
Lately I’ve taken to regularly including a text file that spells out various dependency versions and why they matter in LLM context, but there’s only so much it can do currently to overcome the weight of training on dated material. I imagine tools like Cursor will get better at doing that for us silently in the future.
There’s an interesting tension brewing between keeping dependencies up to date, especially in the volatile and brittle front end world, vs writing code the LLMs are trained on.
However, more and more component libraries are based on tailwind so I decided to try some immersion therapy.
Here are the top things I enjoy that was not obvious to me:
1. The class names are css shortcuts. Using them save you a lot of time. This is probably obvious to anyone who’s seriously looked at tailwind but I didn’t see that browsing the docs. I just saw nightmarishly long lines.
2. The lines look longer when you are not familiar with the class names. I initially pulled all of my class names out into a string outside my markup and included similar to how I’m used to using emotioncss. This made tailwind tolerable for me at first. However after several days I started to feel less turned off by those lines. I think it’s because I could recognize them. I will still break down a line with something like clsx.
3. clsx helps so much vs trying to entirely rely on tailwind syntax. The docs don’t discourage this at all but for some reason I thought it wasn’t idiomatic tailwind at first.
4. My app has to support a very large number of themes. Tailwind has proven to be a very attractive way of solving this problem. CSS variables are cool but the long syntax of using them is helped a lot in tailwind.
5. Adding my own custom variants is so easy and made me feel like a power user with such a small learning curve.
All of this is just my two cents to guide anyone who is like me watching from the sideline and wondering why? Why would anyone ever want to tolerate those “disgusting long lines mixed into the html”. Neo, all I see is the lady in the red dress now
I was in never ts/tailwind gang for a few years until I tried them.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope https://caniuse.com/?search=%40scope
Bootstrap is bad enough, where you end up using 4, 5, 6 classes for display, margin, padding alterations to existing components.
It’s just unreadable crap. No wonder it’s popular though. Most people suck at designing. The ones that don’t aren’t using Tailwind.
True. And they're not using HTML or CSS either.
I am excited for what comes after it, until then I'll use Tailwind (reluctantly)
Instead of using classes (which are extremely limiting) they should have created their own language like Imba did (inspired by TW).
Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210553 - Nov 2024 (125 comments)
Congrats to tailwind team!
I forked and finished Tachyons successor Tachyons 5: It has container queries built in and p3 colors.
https://github.com/gobijan/tachyons5/blob/main/tachyons5.css
If you need very sophisticated layouts write them in plain css. For quick styling utilities are awesome.
Unpopular opinion. Now downvote me to the ground.
As a burgeoning web developer, dealing with animation libraries seems like it's not worth the effort (or at least not for something as simple as a blog), so this is much appreciated.