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0 pointsjitl1y ago0 comments

Sure? I don’t see how that’s an argument for CSS “being advanced enough” - SASS ain’t CSS.

I like SASS (I wrote a lisp in SASS in 2011 lol) and that’s actually how I think about Tailwind utilities - it’s just using SASS mixins directly in your HTML. I would rather use Tailwind because it will take 1/3 the levels of abstraction, 1/4 the keystrokes and 1/2 the files to do the same job to:

1. Pick a class name (myclass) if people are using BEM or something this requires some algebraic thinking.

2. Write the class in file.scss to define the class and include mixins A, B, C

3. Add class=myclass in my html.

Vs tailwind:

1. Add class=“A B C” to my html.

I don’t really get pre processor vs post processor, it’s a build step to run at some point before I deploy with either tool that will produce some css files. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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rglullis1y ago· 1 in thread

> I don’t see how that’s an argument for CSS “being advanced enough”

That's a separate argument.

I hear mostly two justifications for tailwind:

1. It is (or used to be) hard to do things in CSS like variables, calculated properties, themes, scoped rules / namespacing. (Pre/Post) Processors are going to be required anyway, so we might as well use Tailwind

2. It gives frontend developers and designers a common language (the utility classes) which makes it easier to establish workflows.

My argument for (1) is that CSS already supports a lot of things that used to require processors, and (2) could be achieved with a simple "library" that could just be imported directly.

jitlOP1y ago

I agree neither of those seem like good reasons to pick tailwind.

My take is that it removes needless indirection in any codebase that already has “components” - react/vue/solid/etc, template partials, functions that return html strings, whatever. See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42804831

For that reason, plus it’s concision, I find it more productive use of time compared to css-in-separate-file.

If you don’t have components for separating semantics from presentation, then tailwind is less a good fit.

rglullis1y ago

> I don’t really get pre processor vs post processor, it’s a build step to run at some point before I deploy with either tool that will produce some css files.

Not quite the same. If it's only a preprocessor, the tool is only dependent on your styling code. A post-processor needs the whole application.

It's a lot easier to add or remove a pre-processor from your development process, and for those that want to consume your styles it is a lot nicer when you don't have to adopt their tooling as well. E.g, I can create a "utility class library" in SASS, generate the CSS and let people just import that directly into their web pages. Is that possible to do with tailwind?

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