Honestly, I don't buy it. It might be the case if you are trying to target IE9, but "we've been trying it over a decade" is no longer an excuse in 2020 when there are only 2-3 relevant browser engines and all of them are reasonably up to spec.
Also, it's not a matter of strictly separating the groups of people doing one task or another. It's a matter of being able to extend in one dimension while keeping the other untouched.
> They're too intertwined and CSS alone isn't powerful enough to do everything you want.
I'd argue that is precisely backwards. The reason that we don't see any more different designs and more bold experiments is because we are not defining the interaction points between different layers in the development stack.
If most developers keep this mentality that all they need to do is to get a system that solves their immediate problems and solves their own unique solution, then all they are going to do is this mushing together of their structure and their presentation layers, and all we are going to get is a pile architectures are going to converge to different local maxima. If instead we don't take the easy way out and make things with flexibility and extensibility in mind, then the likelihood of it becoming the basis of something ground-breaking grows enormously.
> Honestly, I don't buy it. It might be the case if you are trying to target IE9, but "we've been trying it over a decade" is no longer an excuse in 2020 when there are only 2-3 relevant browser engines and all of them are reasonably up to spec.
> Also, it's not a matter of strictly separating the groups of people doing one task or another. It's a matter of being able to extend in one dimension while keeping the other untouched.
Have you worked on a website with a complex web design? If you know how to do this where you write the HTML with only semantic markup tags then don't touch it again while you style it with CSS, you're breaking new ground because nobody has figured out how to do this.
That's why Tailwind, Tachyons, Bootstrap etc. exist and continue to evolve - nobody has figured out the best way to do things yet. The MVC style you can do in other languages just isn't practical with standard HTML and CSS and it's not through lack of people trying. CSS has rapidly been improving the last few years but we're still a long way away from being able to avoid e.g. adding a wrapper div or shuffling HTML around to solve CSS issues.
> all they are going to do is this mushing together of their structure and their presentation layers
I think the issue here is you think HTML is for structure only and CSS is for presentation only, when the practical reality is HTML is mostly part of the presentation layer as well because CSS alone isn't powerful + practical enough.
Large websites already store their page titles, page content etc. in a structured CMS database. What tangible benefit are you getting by pushing to separate structure and presentation more than this?
For non-web apps, how is structure and presentation split up more than this and how does it differ from web apps?
> If you know how to do this where you write the HTML with only semantic markup tags then don't touch it again while you style it with CSS.
No, I said that I style it with SCSS.
I can give you all the utility classes you want - in the form of mixins. Then all your site styling and components can be defined in terms of these mixins.
I said that I am not against Tailwind in general. What I don't understand about it is the idea of having already all the mixins and utility classes and then letting people stick those in the HTML.
> What tangible benefit are you getting by pushing to separate structure and presentation more than this?
Go take a look at the template sites like ThemeForest and CreativeTim. Some of the templates look actually quite nice and could be an excellent starting point for a project. What they all have in common is that you have 5 JS technologies and maybe 3-4 different styles and they sell each permutation of these as a separate "bundle".
Then you actually download the thing and start working with it. You find out that some older versions will use Bootstrap 3, some will use Bootstrap 4. Some of them have their widget implemented with an outdated jquery plugin, but the rest is with React/Vue. And then you realize why no one makes big projects out of these things, because it requires an all-or-nothing approach when it is not necessary.
In my fantasy land, we get javascript UI component libraries that are standardized and a separate set of SCSS implementation of "design languages". So when I am writing an app and I want to have, say, an autocomplete that looks like Material Design, I can import only one widget and one "theme", instead of hoping that some React/Vue/Angular/Nuxt/Svelte/JS_FRAMEWORK_DU_JOUR has already implemented components following the style of Material/Bootstrap/God-Knows-what-Design-Language-is-fashionable-today.
Also, it's not a matter of strictly separating the groups of people doing one task or another. It's a matter of being able to extend in one dimension while keeping the other untouched.
> They're too intertwined and CSS alone isn't powerful enough to do everything you want.
I'd argue that is precisely backwards. The reason that we don't see any more different designs and more bold experiments is because we are not defining the interaction points between different layers in the development stack.
If most developers keep this mentality that all they need to do is to get a system that solves their immediate problems and solves their own unique solution, then all they are going to do is this mushing together of their structure and their presentation layers, and all we are going to get is a pile architectures are going to converge to different local maxima. If instead we don't take the easy way out and make things with flexibility and extensibility in mind, then the likelihood of it becoming the basis of something ground-breaking grows enormously.