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I’ve read a decent amount about Tailwind and I really appreciate what it offers. I see all the claims of people who were unsure, tried it, and fell in love, and

I’ve read a decent amount about Tailwind and I really appreciate what it offers. I see all the claims of people who were unsure, tried it, and fell in love, and I don’t doubt their experiences. It seems great. The sad reality for me: I am very very productive with a mix of inline styles and Emotion/Styled-Components! I genuinely enjoy writing CSS. A library like MUI gives me a foundation of consistency and helpful utilities, but I love the ability to drop back into CSS and express ideas in a universal styling language that any experienced frontend developer should be able to understand. I move fast. I can show my code to others for feedback and they’ll be able to contribute. I genuinely enjoy it. Tailwind does offer some ways of writing CSS but my understanding from the docs is that they are discouraged. They certainly don’t give the ease and quick feedback of in-line or Emotion. I’m also highly suspicious of the longevity of the utility class approach and its shorthand. It makes me think of my experience with Slim templates in Ruby: it felt like a force multiplier at the time but but only other initiates appreciated it and it looked like absolute gibberish when I came back to it years later. These projects would have been better sticking with ERB since it’s the HTML everyone knows sprinkled with Ruby where needed. My initial impression of Tailwind is the same: “this looks crazy but everyone swears that it’s a breeze once you learn the syntax!” Will the end result be the same? Again, no disrespect to anyone who enjoys it. I fully recognize the many drawbacks of inline styles and Emotion, particularly around performance. I’m currently lamenting the incompatibility of Emotion and React Server Components. I plan on giving Tailwind a fair shot soon and I’m open to having my mind changed, but I do hope it has more staying power than Slim templates.

chatmasta 4y ago
This echoes my feelings exactly, but another aspect of it that turns me off is evident in the walking-on-eggshells qualifications you need to add to your comment to avoid being attacked by its "initiates." In comparison, my experience with adopting TypeScript was one where my initial skepticism was met with people clearly explaining the benefits of using it. And TypeScript has a similar aspect where you need to try it to really understand its benefits, but it also has clear value propositions that can be described and considered on their fundamental merits. Tailwind does not seem to have the same kind of benefits, so the arguments boil down to variants of "with us or against us" and "look at all these people using it." And from that perspective, I see a lot of people who I respect a lot who are _not_ using it. Whereas I never saw many experts saying "TypeScript sucks don't use it" - they just quietly adopted it because type safety was important to them on its merits.

chatmasta 4y ago

This echoes my feelings exactly, but another aspect of it that turns me off is evident in the walking-on-eggshells qualifications you need to add to your comment to avoid being attacked by its "initiates." In comparison, my experience with adopting TypeScript was one where my initial skepticism was met with people clearly explaining the benefits of using it. And TypeScript has a similar aspect where you need to try it to really understand its benefits, but it also has clear value propositions that can be described and considered on their fundamental merits. Tailwind does not seem to have the same kind of benefits, so the arguments boil down to variants of "with us or against us" and "look at all these people using it." And from that perspective, I see a lot of people who I respect a lot who are _not_ using it. Whereas I never saw many experts saying "TypeScript sucks don't use it" - they just quietly adopted it because type safety was important to them on its merits.