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When I first learned about Tailwind I though "wow this is amazing!", but it quickly became obvious I was more or less learning another "language", which I reall

When I first learned about Tailwind I though "wow this is amazing!", but it quickly became obvious I was more or less learning another "language", which I really didn't need when re-entering the crazy world of frontend. I might reconsider it again once I am more comfortable with what frontend has become, but that is still quite a bit away.

hising 7y ago
I was experiencing the same thing. I thought it looked really well crafted, but bumped into the same finding as you. Components built on top of it would be great though!
ripley12 7y ago
I had a different experience – Tailwind made CSS a lot more approachable for me. A big part of Tailwind's value is that it provides a curated, well-documented subset of the most important CSS attributes. The utility classes are consistently and concisely named (unlike many native CSS properties, which grew organically). You're totally right that it is yet another abstraction, and that can be tiring. Personally I found it to be well-designed and transparent enough to make it worthwhile.
- lsinger 7y ago
  The documentation alone is great — it helped me learn things about CSS I had been kind of using but had never fully grasped.
  - rawfan 7y ago
    100% agree. I learned more about CSS in the Tailwind docs than in all the years I copy and pasted before starting with Tailwind.
koboll 7y ago
Tailwind's draw seems to be in its name -- it helps you work faster. So for people whose bottleneck is writing lots and lots of HTML/CSS, it's probably great. I'm guessing most of the naysayers here work in the web applications world with component-based architectures, where the HTML/CSS is a small portion of the total time they spend coding, so they can't understand why someone would sacrifice readability, maintainability, and organization for speed on something that isn't a bottleneck for them. The thing is, it absolutely might be a bottleneck for agencies and other companies that need to build lots of custom sites.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Tailwind's draw seems to be in its name -- it helps you work faster. And the argument is that this comes at the expense of maintainability.
doubletgl 7y ago
We ended up painfully removing it from a large frontend project because the custom classes sprinkled everywhere got out of hand and the design started to look more and more inconsistent in a lot of places. Switched to CSS modules (and React components using them) and never looked back.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  This is exactly what I'm concerned about at my current location. In a world where it's tough to get anyone to refactor, what's it going to look like after 6 months of use and nobody is creating abstractions into semantic classes? It seems like if your project is not suited to a "website bashing" or prototyping approach long term, and you need semantic classes to allow for easy theming type use cases, it could be more trouble than it's worth?
lxe 7y ago
It's just CSS classes. You do style="p-4" to make a horizontal padding. It's the simplest thing to learn -- by a long shot compared to most UI libraries everyone has been cooking up lately.

hising 7y ago

I was experiencing the same thing. I thought it looked really well crafted, but bumped into the same finding as you. Components built on top of it would be great though!

ripley12 7y ago

I had a different experience – Tailwind made CSS a lot more approachable for me. A big part of Tailwind's value is that it provides a curated, well-documented subset of the most important CSS attributes. The utility classes are consistently and concisely named (unlike many native CSS properties, which grew organically). You're totally right that it is yet another abstraction, and that can be tiring. Personally I found it to be well-designed and transparent enough to make it worthwhile.

lsinger 7y ago
The documentation alone is great — it helped me learn things about CSS I had been kind of using but had never fully grasped.
- rawfan 7y ago
  100% agree. I learned more about CSS in the Tailwind docs than in all the years I copy and pasted before starting with Tailwind.

koboll 7y ago

Tailwind's draw seems to be in its name -- it helps you work faster. So for people whose bottleneck is writing lots and lots of HTML/CSS, it's probably great. I'm guessing most of the naysayers here work in the web applications world with component-based architectures, where the HTML/CSS is a small portion of the total time they spend coding, so they can't understand why someone would sacrifice readability, maintainability, and organization for speed on something that isn't a bottleneck for them. The thing is, it absolutely might be a bottleneck for agencies and other companies that need to build lots of custom sites.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Tailwind's draw seems to be in its name -- it helps you work faster. And the argument is that this comes at the expense of maintainability.

doubletgl 7y ago

We ended up painfully removing it from a large frontend project because the custom classes sprinkled everywhere got out of hand and the design started to look more and more inconsistent in a lot of places. Switched to CSS modules (and React components using them) and never looked back.

Rapzid 7y ago
This is exactly what I'm concerned about at my current location. In a world where it's tough to get anyone to refactor, what's it going to look like after 6 months of use and nobody is creating abstractions into semantic classes? It seems like if your project is not suited to a "website bashing" or prototyping approach long term, and you need semantic classes to allow for easy theming type use cases, it could be more trouble than it's worth?

lxe 7y ago

It's just CSS classes. You do style="p-4" to make a horizontal padding. It's the simplest thing to learn -- by a long shot compared to most UI libraries everyone has been cooking up lately.