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Author here. In retrospect a couple months after writing this post, I don't love it. I still am in love with Tailwind and Functional CSS, but I did a poor job d

Author here. In retrospect a couple months after writing this post, I don't love it. I still am in love with Tailwind and Functional CSS, but I did a poor job defending it. I'd suggest that everyone read this post [1] by Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind CSS. It does a much better job explaining and defending than I did. [1] https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/ https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...

DevX101 8y ago
To be clear, you don't love the post, or you've changed your mind on functional CSS?
- mcrittenden 8y ago
  Ah sorry, I just meant I don't love the post (and I just updated my comment to make that more clear). If anything I am even more a fan of functional CSS now than I was when I wrote this. But my post is just a bad defense of it. The section about the separation of concerns is especially unconvincing, and I spent almost no time talking about the benefits of it. I'd like to rewrite it at some point.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pknopf 8y ago
    Well, hey, I dig the honesty.
AlphaWeaver 8y ago
Thanks for posting this! This article was a really good read that I think communicated the intent behind your original article much better.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Great article. The author mentions all the pain points I went through designing a mid-sized sass base... there's just too many ways to do things and it gets messy fast. It's hard to be both semantic and DRY at the same time. Might as well just treat everything the same across the board, e.g. tailwinds and reduce the overall complexity of naming I read many functional CSS articles but this one has convinced me to try it out
johnmw 8y ago
This is a great article, it helped clarify my understanding of functional CSS and made some really good points. However, I still don't think it is the complete answer. Mostly, if I'm wearing my developer hat (rather than designer hat), functional CSS would drive me batty. If you are working in a larger team, where some of the team write the HTML and some write the CSS styling, this really disadvantages the people who work with the HTML. As a developer, I need to write HTML where I am semantically describing what the component is doing as I have no idea about the details of the design. What might work is a hybrid approach? That is, designers work with functional CSS and then at the end, map the compositions back to the semantic class styling? I.e you would do mostly the same thing, but would move the functional CSS styling into the CSS and have a mappings at the end. Would this give the best of both worlds - keeping the HTML semantic, but still allowing designers to mostly work with functional CSS?

DevX101 8y ago

To be clear, you don't love the post, or you've changed your mind on functional CSS?

mcrittenden 8y ago
Ah sorry, I just meant I don't love the post (and I just updated my comment to make that more clear). If anything I am even more a fan of functional CSS now than I was when I wrote this. But my post is just a bad defense of it. The section about the separation of concerns is especially unconvincing, and I spent almost no time talking about the benefits of it. I'd like to rewrite it at some point.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pknopf 8y ago
  Well, hey, I dig the honesty.

AlphaWeaver 8y ago

Thanks for posting this! This article was a really good read that I think communicated the intent behind your original article much better.

Kagerjay 8y ago

Great article. The author mentions all the pain points I went through designing a mid-sized sass base... there's just too many ways to do things and it gets messy fast. It's hard to be both semantic and DRY at the same time. Might as well just treat everything the same across the board, e.g. tailwinds and reduce the overall complexity of naming I read many functional CSS articles but this one has convinced me to try it out

johnmw 8y ago

This is a great article, it helped clarify my understanding of functional CSS and made some really good points. However, I still don't think it is the complete answer. Mostly, if I'm wearing my developer hat (rather than designer hat), functional CSS would drive me batty. If you are working in a larger team, where some of the team write the HTML and some write the CSS styling, this really disadvantages the people who work with the HTML. As a developer, I need to write HTML where I am semantically describing what the component is doing as I have no idea about the details of the design. What might work is a hybrid approach? That is, designers work with functional CSS and then at the end, map the compositions back to the semantic class styling? I.e you would do mostly the same thing, but would move the functional CSS styling into the CSS and have a mappings at the end. Would this give the best of both worlds - keeping the HTML semantic, but still allowing designers to mostly work with functional CSS?