3 ms·

Here's a thought: HTML does not separate structure, or content, from presentation. I'm not sure where the myth of the web's separation of concerns first arose -

Here's a thought: HTML does not separate structure, or content, from presentation. I'm not sure where the myth of the web's separation of concerns first arose - possibly from some architecture astronaut who'd never written an element in their life, perhaps from someone who really knew better but needed to slip something past the mediocrity police - but irrespective of what any non-normative reference may say, HTML does in practice blend structure, semantics, content, and presentation. CSS and JS substantially augment the presentation and semantics, but fighting against the grain of what HTML fundamentally embodies, instead of leaning on the framework, is a prime recipe for technical debt, not to mention opening the door for an awful lot of NIH. Tailwind responds to that with an organising principle of styles refactored at the abstraction level of page components. It is not supplying an off-the-shelf design system for front-end novices a la bootstrap/material design. That is an excellent fit for a template-driven world, which is to say, most applications of scale. It is also an excellent fit for anyone (or any HTML generation language) that thinks of data as functional and anonymous. Naming things is hard, so the fewer things we're forced to name the better. My CSS has even improved from using Tailwind, not just thanks to the excellent docs but because it's been easy to experiment with alternative compositions. To your specific inquiry - I've been maintaining several Tailwind frontends for a few years now, and it's been more reusable, more composable, and more maintainable that any of the hand-crafted CSS I might've written in the past, no matter how polished and proud I was of it.

po 3y ago
I'm not sure where the myth of the web's separation of concerns first arose - possibly from some architecture astronaut who'd never written an element in their life, perhaps from someone who really knew better but needed to slip something past the mediocrity police I'm pretty sure it came from CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com http://www.csszengarden.com). The same HTML with dozens of different presentations all done exclusively with CSS changes. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that for the most part the separation is a myth, but I personally remember before seeing CSS Zen Garden, the idea wasn't as common.
- louzell 3y ago
  It's hard to argue against the power of separating content from presentation when we can see the results with our own eyes in a couple clicks on Zen Garden. I have a hard time seeing how the disparaging title of "architecture astronaut" is warranted by it.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    HTML and CSS has overlapping control over many properties on how a given document is rendered, so Zen Garden is more like “check out this Turing complete program written in CSS” — cute and interesting, but it is not practical as we can see from.. literally no real website doing anything remotely like that. This myth came from a time when we had markdown-level HTML markups, and it made sense back then: sure, why not let me color headers red? But it doesn’t scale as it simply doesn’t compose. That cascading part doesn’t make sense for many properties: should padding be inherited? It basically never makes sense. Components are the sane building blocks (as has been realized by desktop GUIs decades ago), and we are much better off with strong encapsulation here (shadow dom is a welcome change).
  - isleyaardvark 3y ago
    That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content. It’s like one of those demos people make of a CSS-only thingamajig that would be much easier to do any other technology. It makes for an interesting tech demo but isn’t practical for day-to-day development.
    - Clamchop 3y ago
      Templates, themeable products like WordPress, dark modes and alt accessibility presentations...
    - imbnwa 3y ago
      >That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content. Didn't Github just re-style their whole UI? Presuming that's an extreme possibility seems like premature optimization unless you run Product.
runlaszlorun 3y ago
‘architect astronaut’ is a great phrase.
easyThrowaway 3y ago
If HTML were specifically about structure instead of presentation, stuff like line-height or text-transform (which carry an obvious semantic value) would've been tags rather than CSS properties. HTML+CSS(+SVG+JS+Web Workers+etc...) is not a formally correct framework, and personally I can appreciate what Tailwind can achieve even if strays a bit further from an ideal approach.

po 3y ago

I'm not sure where the myth of the web's separation of concerns first arose - possibly from some architecture astronaut who'd never written an element in their life, perhaps from someone who really knew better but needed to slip something past the mediocrity police I'm pretty sure it came from CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com http://www.csszengarden.com). The same HTML with dozens of different presentations all done exclusively with CSS changes. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that for the most part the separation is a myth, but I personally remember before seeing CSS Zen Garden, the idea wasn't as common.

louzell 3y ago
It's hard to argue against the power of separating content from presentation when we can see the results with our own eyes in a couple clicks on Zen Garden. I have a hard time seeing how the disparaging title of "architecture astronaut" is warranted by it.
- kaba0 3y ago
  HTML and CSS has overlapping control over many properties on how a given document is rendered, so Zen Garden is more like “check out this Turing complete program written in CSS” — cute and interesting, but it is not practical as we can see from.. literally no real website doing anything remotely like that. This myth came from a time when we had markdown-level HTML markups, and it made sense back then: sure, why not let me color headers red? But it doesn’t scale as it simply doesn’t compose. That cascading part doesn’t make sense for many properties: should padding be inherited? It basically never makes sense. Components are the sane building blocks (as has been realized by desktop GUIs decades ago), and we are much better off with strong encapsulation here (shadow dom is a welcome change).
- isleyaardvark 3y ago
  That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content. It’s like one of those demos people make of a CSS-only thingamajig that would be much easier to do any other technology. It makes for an interesting tech demo but isn’t practical for day-to-day development.
  - Clamchop 3y ago
    Templates, themeable products like WordPress, dark modes and alt accessibility presentations...
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    >That power is only for the contrived example of doing a complete redesign that doesn’t change any of the html content. Didn't Github just re-style their whole UI? Presuming that's an extreme possibility seems like premature optimization unless you run Product.

runlaszlorun 3y ago

‘architect astronaut’ is a great phrase.

easyThrowaway 3y ago

If HTML were specifically about structure instead of presentation, stuff like line-height or text-transform (which carry an obvious semantic value) would've been tags rather than CSS properties. HTML+CSS(+SVG+JS+Web Workers+etc...) is not a formally correct framework, and personally I can appreciate what Tailwind can achieve even if strays a bit further from an ideal approach.