7 ms·

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.

koboll 8y ago
At that point, why not just write actual CSS?
- mkarnicki 8y ago
  Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place. Tailwind allows you to create a consistent design system. CSS was supposed to be "write one class, use it everywhere instead of inlining". Usually it ends up with nobody reusing that class and everyone creating their on in the same codebase. There's an article I don't have a link handy, which explained how ridiculously many classes were used by GitHub/Lab, Airbnb, etc. Now even GitHub have their own utility based CSS system and others are following along, including Bootstrap with their CSS utility classes.
  - LaGrange 8y ago
    > Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place. That's not really the case since SCSS became a thing. If SCSS doesn't help you, Tailwind won't, you can ignore their classes just as you could ignore preset constants. Honestly, to me it seems like people are just starting "fresh" with a benefit of some experience, and ascribing the benefits of experience to the tool.
    - stefanfisk 8y ago
      I've used SASS for years, and yet switching to tailwind felt reaaally nice. have you tried it for yourself, or are you just assuming that you understand the practical differences?
      - LaGrange 8y ago
        Tailwind isn't a particularly new invention. I've worked with similar tools developed in-house years ago, and have no desire to do it again, no.
  - jacamat 8y ago
    you have that with tailwind too, lol. probably even worse the bigger your app is.
    - mkarnicki 8y ago
      Can you elaborate? I can't agree with you. Tailwind is meant to provide a consistent design system, of which CSS size should never get out of hand (which is the case then using regular CSS). Whenever I use Tailwind, I end up adding maybe 20-30 lines of CSS and I never have to open a CSS (or other sass/less/whatever) ever again. Have you tried Tailwind or you're just assuming what you're saying?
judofyr 8y ago
It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is very common and "padding-horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters.
- Isofarro 8y ago
  In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters. I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page!
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    It's a decision to optimize write-ability, not readability. Not sure why this is so puzzling.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      It's puzzling because the same people then shit on Perl for being "write-only".
      - gnulinux 8y ago
        I agree with your sentiment. I think this is because half the programmers like mnemonics and the other half prefers English, so no matter what you do people criticize your choice. People call Java verbose and perl write-only.
  - judofyr 8y ago

It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression.

koboll 8y ago

At that point, why not just write actual CSS?

mkarnicki 8y ago
Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place. Tailwind allows you to create a consistent design system. CSS was supposed to be "write one class, use it everywhere instead of inlining". Usually it ends up with nobody reusing that class and everyone creating their on in the same codebase. There's an article I don't have a link handy, which explained how ridiculously many classes were used by GitHub/Lab, Airbnb, etc. Now even GitHub have their own utility based CSS system and others are following along, including Bootstrap with their CSS utility classes.
- LaGrange 8y ago
  > Because you'll have 29 different margins, 67 different left paddings, etc all over the place. That's not really the case since SCSS became a thing. If SCSS doesn't help you, Tailwind won't, you can ignore their classes just as you could ignore preset constants. Honestly, to me it seems like people are just starting "fresh" with a benefit of some experience, and ascribing the benefits of experience to the tool.
  - stefanfisk 8y ago
    I've used SASS for years, and yet switching to tailwind felt reaaally nice. have you tried it for yourself, or are you just assuming that you understand the practical differences?
    - LaGrange 8y ago
      Tailwind isn't a particularly new invention. I've worked with similar tools developed in-house years ago, and have no desire to do it again, no.
- jacamat 8y ago
  you have that with tailwind too, lol. probably even worse the bigger your app is.
  - mkarnicki 8y ago
    Can you elaborate? I can't agree with you. Tailwind is meant to provide a consistent design system, of which CSS size should never get out of hand (which is the case then using regular CSS). Whenever I use Tailwind, I end up adding maybe 20-30 lines of CSS and I never have to open a CSS (or other sass/less/whatever) ever again. Have you tried Tailwind or you're just assuming what you're saying?

judofyr 8y ago

It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose (https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is very common and "padding-horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters.

Isofarro 8y ago
In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters. I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page!
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  It's a decision to optimize write-ability, not readability. Not sure why this is so puzzling.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    It's puzzling because the same people then shit on Perl for being "write-only".
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      I agree with your sentiment. I think this is because half the programmers like mnemonics and the other half prefers English, so no matter what you do people criticize your choice. People call Java verbose and perl write-only.
- judofyr 8y ago