I miss CSS compilers like SCSS/LESS on your vita ;-)

Basically the best way to do CSS I ever worked with was using Bootstrap the LESS way. You could use a sean HTML code with semantic (=speaking) class names and basically do the mapping to bootstrap classes within LESS. This was subsequently compiled to short CSS code. The best of all worlds.

I guess the CSS framework SemanticUI has a similar idea in mind. However, most people use it in the same way as Tailwind. This is web technology as it was done 10+ years ago, when people mixed markup and styling. It's a pity that young folks don't know...

1. this is a pain.

2. i'll write an abstraction

3. the abstraction is a pain

You can use postcss and @apply tag to compose single classes that you can use in your html code like .btn-blue

.btn-blue {

@apply py-2 px-5 flex items-center bg-blue-500 text-white rounded

}

So I don't really see that as a problem. You are supposed to refactor your styles later to be more reusable. What tailwind provides is fast iteration and design. I love that.

The exact problem is the 99% of people who DON’T do this and their markup ends up a Frankenstein’s monstrosity. I don’t know if it’s the new crop of front-end “developers” who don’t know the very basics or just hipsters being hipsters and YOLO all the things. Tailwind (IMHO) promotes bad practices and needs to explicitly state that you SHOULD use @apply or a puppy somewhere will die.

Oooorrrr some of us just don't care what you might think are good practices. I find tossing classes is more maintainable than trying to refactor down.

I'm a FE dev with 10 years experience.

I've only started using Tailwind specifically in the last year or so, but I've been using functional CSS for about 6 years.

I don't believe using @apply is a maintainable approach. A better approach is to use view templates. In fact Adam Wathan recommends this way too in this video https://youtu.be/J_7_mnFSLDg

I think you can blame compilation time for that. If you only use tailwind utility classes, there is no need for recompilation on every change but with @apply directive and external CSS file, the thing gets compiled every time you make a change.

I wonder if they can bypass compilation in development mode somehow.

I second this! I have gone full circle myself. From Dreamweaver (have to start somewhere), hand coding, Bootstrap classes and modifying them, then naturally started using utility classes. Finally made the switch to Tailwind (felt like cheating on a lover, because I loved Bootstrap so much). I then went full on utility classes and low and behold, discovered @apply with nested @screen media queries and went right back to writing clean HTML with named CSS classes that use utility classes in a SCSS file. Its so cool to me, I want to tell everyone about it.

PS: Plus postcss purge. CSS ecosystem is complete!

> Plus postcss purge

What does this mean?

I believe they're referring to https://github.com/FullHuman/purgecss.

Please, tell me more :)

Here is an example off the top of my head, while on iphone:

.card { @apply flex flex-row shadow rounded-md p-4; @screen md { @apply flex-col p-6; } yada... yada... }

then in tailwind config, point the purge path to your html file(s) to purge.

End result is css file with no more and no less than what you need, and in the web inspector you see clean HTML markup and clean CSS declarations.

edit: typo

that's ridiculous, why not just write padding: 2px 5px; display: flex; align-items: center; color: #fff; You are basically just creating a set of attributes that just mimic standard css properties, I find this approach of tailwind absolutely counter productive, and I am surprised that it gets so much popularity.

I think there are two reasons:

- you can copy the classes from html directly into @apply (you need to tinker a bit more to get responsive/hover/etc classes to work, though)

- you work with predefined values, so if you switch color in tailwind.config.js, it's gonna get correct value in the @apply class too.

That's the way I see it

2. which values are you going to ever change in align-center, display-flex and text-color-white, it's not like you will change the display flex to mean display block or align center to mean align start, it will always be the same. Same with color white and 95% of other classes that tailwind uses.

For the second one, couldn’t you get the same effect by just using css variables?

Sure you can and you should, right?

But this way you have to write couple of classes more, couple of variables more. And with Tailwind you just define/change value in the config and you have all the classes generated, so the changes are minimal.

I used to think the same way until i tried it, now i'm completely hooked. it actually makes sense not to extract everything in a "class" simply to separate the presentation out, since that class probably isn't reusable.

plus, it's mostly made to be used with vue/react components which should be small standalone units.

I'm personally looking forward to building websites since using tailwind after a long time

Quick FYI, py-2 is REM based, not pixel. So you know your design will fill properly.

Everybody makes @apply out to be the eventual solution to HTML soup, and a project I'm on uses it heavily—BUT the problem is you're now completely locked into a single framework. You can't ditch Tailwind and still use @apply bg-blue-500. If you used regular CSS properties, design tokens via CSS variables, etc. it would be completely portable. I've switched entire sites from one CSS framework to another and it's challenging but doable with standard approaches. With Tailwind, good luck with that…

Um. The Tailwind compiler produces a plain CSS stylesheet with all the classes you need and none of the ones you don't. You can just dig that out of your build (or wget it from production) and stick it where you normally stick your styles(..!).

That's a single output file compiled down from multiple source files likely using a preprocessor…lol. That's not a solution!

Didn't the @apply tag get rejected from the spec? https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5753701012602880

I could use sass to do the same.

Yes. You can use tailwind with sass as well though it's not recommended.

Think of tailwind as a framework for all your styling needs while sass is more a functional language to generate CSS for you.

Partially. You'll lose the system Tailwind gives you, which makes it easier to be consistent.

I handcraft that system myself.

It's like buy Ikea furniture and assembling it vs. having your own woodworking shop to handcraft furniture with precise requirements. These frameworks have made me lazy. I think CSS design is pretty much exactly the same as any craftsmanship job - there is so much pleasure from building it from the ground up. No, I still get the knots in the wood out by using reset.css.

Also, I try to not use class selectors as much as possible. HTML looks sterile and spartan with only a handful of span tags or id tags for very specialized targetted changes.

I can see why people use frameworks - its fast and quick. But you lose personality in the outcome.

You mean that @apply tag? https://caniuse.com/css-apply-rule

That is supported by 0% of browsers? Or am I missing something?

This is basically exactly what I get out of writing web components. I get the best of every possible dimension I care about. I can write short neat little snippets of code that encapsulates my HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a single place. I can do it just using really simple CSS because it is all scope, I can actually build reusable components, I’m using the native web platform (though I do recommend lit-element as well) and I can do all using modern tooling and JS and all of the benefits that brings.

Similar curve. I found my optimal trade-off with tachyons.css.

I did the same thing for a recent side project. Only I still use sass.

What benefit does having completely readable HTML offer?

The same benefit as any language you program in. Readability (not saying tailwind is hard, but it can be messy) is one of the most important things I look for.

If you use prettier or similar readability isn't an issue. I'd argue readability is improved since you can tell right away how an element is going to be displayed vs having to open up the css and look there.

What benefit does laying out your circuits cleanly offer? It's pride in your work, a tacit invitation for people who aren't you to look at it. From a functional perspective, does it matter? No, it doesn't really. But it might help you sleep better at night.

Why? Because it makes the document readable... for machines.

You may think about browsers, but if your HTML is a mess, devices that translate content into Braille or read it as audio, won't be able to make sense of it.

That might not sound like a problem, but this might very well cause legal issues in some business cases (e.g. people with an impairment can't access a website of a public administration? That might be a civil rights violation in some countries).

Another reason is because it makes it easier to extract data and information from HTML documents: search engines and search spiders. If your HTML is a mess, you're going to take a SEO hit.

That's just two concrete concerns that come to my mind right now.

HTML and CSS today are mostly used for presentational & interactive purposes: push UI components in there right place, with the desired shapes, colours, fonts, animations and so on, in order to build complex interactive applications.

But HTML wasn't originally conceived for that purpose. The word "markup" says all you need to know. The entire purpose of a HTML tag was simply to describe the structure of a text document: this bit here is the header, that bit is a paragraph, the next bit contains an image, and here are a few meta tags with extra information about the document you're reading.

However, as markets drove demand for more and more interactivity - applications in browsers rather then just static documents - browser technologies including HTML evolved beyond the original scope of "marking up text documents". That original design foundation is still there: marking the content structure of a document through HTML tags, though.

The problem is that developers want to cater to demands to build these nice fancy UI experiences that need to be rendered perfectly on various devices. And so, the original intent of HTML goes right out of the window. What's left is an unreadable mess of spaghetti HTML, mangled DOM's with non-sensical auto-generated CSS classes to which one needs compilers and transpilers and entire toolchains as you write your CSS in an entirely abstracted fashion.

When you're building a complex interactive application for the browser. That's just the current state of affairs one will have to accept. Presently, you're still, in essence, using tools that originally never were designed for that purpose.

However, if you're just going to build a simple blog or a site with static content, it pays dividends to think about the structure of your content, consider the semantics of your HTML and the CSS classes you're going to use. Using pure CSS, you could then easily write lean, performant and understandable stylesheets that don't need to be processed by complex toolchains. And you certainly wouldn't need complex frameworks to build a website.

Of course, YMMV, and so there's definitely a market for Tailwind and their ilk. I do think that developers should learn about "golden hammer" syndrome early in their career: while frameworks make your life as a developer easier, they aren't the best choice in all use cases.

From the perspective of a "body shopping" business, it makes sense to standardize the process as much as possible and fall back to a few well known tools and practices with repeatable - and therefore measurable - outcomes. In the same vain, the big trade off here is providing any form sanity/clarity when someone hits the "browse source" button in there browser.

amen. Not comprompsing layout for responsiveness... things have improved since the 960-grid days. (you've been around!) Amen.

The problem I have with pure CSS is it relies on the fact that you and your team are experts at CSS, which is almost never the case. Pure CSS with an unexperienced developer can lead to spaghetti pretty quick. There are always limitations with any approach, including frameworks, but on a team with more than 1 developer and long term maintenance in mind I'd prefer to go with a framework more times than not.

I'm tired of this argument: train your devs for the job you have for them, or if they're not trainable, then find them another position not doing stuff they are incapable of.

We're engineers, let's act like it and know our goddamn stuff, not dumb it down to the LCD.

This feels like the story of a lot of web tooling: accessibility over all else, especially performance/future maintenance. The fail-fast/move fast and break things culture of some startups bleeds into the aesthetics of tools. Knowledge of tools begins to be confused with skills. Ironically, it burdens new devs heaviest, as they're not able to sort through which concepts/abstractions that tools bring with them are worthwhile, and which are not.

It drove me away from the platform entirely.

(This isn't about Tailwind, I've never used it, so I can't comment on it.)

Blame companies and job titles like 'Full Stack Dev'