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I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Big generalisation, I know, please don't yell at me, but many of us

I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Big generalisation, I know, please don't yell at me, but many of us can get 99% of Tailwind's value with UI libraries supporting: 1) style encapsulation, 2) colocated presentation/content/behaviour and 3) a more minimalist mindset/habits when building UIs (e.g. relying on simpler styling hierarchies, native DOM elements, semantic HTML instead of div soup). [*] not all, it doesn't mean that it doesn't make "senior" (whatever that means) devs more productive or that if you're using Tailwind you'll lose your 10x dev of the month badge. But, CSS is a misunderstood yet very flexible language which means it can be used or abused in a huge variety of ways.

pookah 3y ago
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fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
What's up with the colocation argument? Colocation of markup and business logic makes a lot of sense. Colocation of presentation? Why do you even need that? Presentation is abstracted into CSS by design. Having presentation decoupled allows you to abstract around visual elements on a page at their instead of having to sufficiently wrap everything in divs classes just to the right level to make the CSs classes work.
- dgb23 3y ago
  The decoupling of CSS and HTML is a lie. HTML describes layout, not just content. Your overall structure is going to be vastly different whether you use flex or grid. And if you don’t want to write overly clever CSS you’re wrapping your dt/dd pairs in divs or you put dummy elements into your sections to control where the anchor links scroll to etc. And don’t get me started on non-hierarchical layout relationships. HTML is not flexible enough and CSS is not expressive enough for this theoretical separation to hold in practice. You would need a translation layer between pure content and layout for this to be true (like XSLT).
  - fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
    I never suggested decoupling html and CSS, that is always going to be coupled through selectors. What I suggested was decoupling presentation (actual CSS rules) from structure, the blocks of html. What I'm discussing here is if CSS rules should be inlined in html, whether through tailwind pseudo css or style tags the result is the same. Further caveat, the article mentions that switching to a CSS file is a context switch. Put it in a style tags next to your html for all I care, colocation is great as a general rule, inlining CSS in html style attributes is not. This is settled thinking at this point: inlining CSS results in short term benefits to productivity at the cost of long term costs due to brittle presentation that is expensive to change. And given how low the cost of extracting reusable css classes is these days, I don't think tailwind will ever win.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  > Presentation is abstracted into CSS by design. The structure of your HTML is as integral a part of the presentation as your CSS is.
  - fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
    Yes, it defines the structural bounds your CSS is able to manipulate. It doesn't dictate how it needs to be manipulated other than a rough idea about what things will render out in what order. (I'd hardly call that presentation) The key point here is that CSS exists precisely because html markup isn't enough on its own to style itself. If it was, CSS wouldn't exist. The idea that something like tailwind can come in with a bunch of fine grained CSS classes and solve this inate complexity is laughable at best and wildly unprofessional at worst. It just shows a complete lack of understanding about what html is and isn't and why CSS even exists in the first place. Fwiw, I get it. Tailwind is a neat shorthand script you can use to pump out trash you'll never look at again. For the rest of us doing actual work on things that we'll need to modify 6 months from now I'd much prefer something readable that I can actually have a hope of modifying even if a teammate wrote the thing.
wildrhythms 3y ago
>I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Umm... How? You have to know CSS and be quite proficient to understand how to map it to Tailwind. I don't understand this claim at all.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  This is called a leaky abstraction. I believe I'm convinced that if an abstraction is leaky then it's garbage. For instance, if I really needed to know say, jvm assembler to code Java then Java would be garbage as an abstraction layer because it would simply be creating problems where they need not be. Java however is clean, which makes it useful. I don't need to know the next level down. C is clean. JavaScript is. PHP is. Tailwind is not. Many frameworks are not. They promise benefits but deliver complexity and programmers get invested into the system and then can't see the reality because it's a classic cult effect of giving emotional salience to a lie. Eventually it collapses and a new one is formed. And for some unknown reason, this. Shit. Does. Not. Stop. It's really exhausting. Been programming nearly 30 years. So sick of it. It would be like if I did say medicine and every 3 months or so the medical community started tripping over itself by believing in the latest weird quack with orgone energies and magnets and started writing prescriptions to their patients about chakras or astrology and then being shocked, like actually genuinely surprised when it all collapses. Why do people run around like a bunch of frenetic teenagers to manufactured hype cycles in programming? Can we please fucking stop. Honestly.
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    I don't view Tailwind as an "abstraction" in the same way that you might say Java is an abstraction over the JVM. If I'm writing Java then I'm only thinking about how Java works, not about the implementation details of the JVM. But when I write Tailwind I'm still very much thinking about the underlying CSS properties. Tailwind just gives me a much more convenient way to add the CSS styles that I already know, with significant reduction to my mental overhead. It hadn't occurred to me that people might be learning Tailwind as if it's a replacement for having to learn or understand CSS. If you treat it that way then you're bound to have a bad time, much like people who treat git as a series of commands to be memorised without any understanding of git's underlying data model. I'll also admit that I've only ever used Tailwind on small-to-medium sized solo projects, so I don't know how it would hold up on a big team. But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on even without Tailwind, so what is there to lose?

pookah 3y ago

[dead]

fjfuvucucuc 3y ago

What's up with the colocation argument? Colocation of markup and business logic makes a lot of sense. Colocation of presentation? Why do you even need that? Presentation is abstracted into CSS by design. Having presentation decoupled allows you to abstract around visual elements on a page at their instead of having to sufficiently wrap everything in divs classes just to the right level to make the CSs classes work.

dgb23 3y ago
The decoupling of CSS and HTML is a lie. HTML describes layout, not just content. Your overall structure is going to be vastly different whether you use flex or grid. And if you don’t want to write overly clever CSS you’re wrapping your dt/dd pairs in divs or you put dummy elements into your sections to control where the anchor links scroll to etc. And don’t get me started on non-hierarchical layout relationships. HTML is not flexible enough and CSS is not expressive enough for this theoretical separation to hold in practice. You would need a translation layer between pure content and layout for this to be true (like XSLT).
- fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
  I never suggested decoupling html and CSS, that is always going to be coupled through selectors. What I suggested was decoupling presentation (actual CSS rules) from structure, the blocks of html. What I'm discussing here is if CSS rules should be inlined in html, whether through tailwind pseudo css or style tags the result is the same. Further caveat, the article mentions that switching to a CSS file is a context switch. Put it in a style tags next to your html for all I care, colocation is great as a general rule, inlining CSS in html style attributes is not. This is settled thinking at this point: inlining CSS results in short term benefits to productivity at the cost of long term costs due to brittle presentation that is expensive to change. And given how low the cost of extracting reusable css classes is these days, I don't think tailwind will ever win.
arrowsmith 3y ago
> Presentation is abstracted into CSS by design. The structure of your HTML is as integral a part of the presentation as your CSS is.
- fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
  Yes, it defines the structural bounds your CSS is able to manipulate. It doesn't dictate how it needs to be manipulated other than a rough idea about what things will render out in what order. (I'd hardly call that presentation) The key point here is that CSS exists precisely because html markup isn't enough on its own to style itself. If it was, CSS wouldn't exist. The idea that something like tailwind can come in with a bunch of fine grained CSS classes and solve this inate complexity is laughable at best and wildly unprofessional at worst. It just shows a complete lack of understanding about what html is and isn't and why CSS even exists in the first place. Fwiw, I get it. Tailwind is a neat shorthand script you can use to pump out trash you'll never look at again. For the rest of us doing actual work on things that we'll need to modify 6 months from now I'd much prefer something readable that I can actually have a hope of modifying even if a teammate wrote the thing.

wildrhythms 3y ago

>I think Tailwind is more accessible to many[*] less experienced or CSS-oriented developers. Umm... How? You have to know CSS and be quite proficient to understand how to map it to Tailwind. I don't understand this claim at all.

kristopolous 3y ago
This is called a leaky abstraction. I believe I'm convinced that if an abstraction is leaky then it's garbage. For instance, if I really needed to know say, jvm assembler to code Java then Java would be garbage as an abstraction layer because it would simply be creating problems where they need not be. Java however is clean, which makes it useful. I don't need to know the next level down. C is clean. JavaScript is. PHP is. Tailwind is not. Many frameworks are not. They promise benefits but deliver complexity and programmers get invested into the system and then can't see the reality because it's a classic cult effect of giving emotional salience to a lie. Eventually it collapses and a new one is formed. And for some unknown reason, this. Shit. Does. Not. Stop. It's really exhausting. Been programming nearly 30 years. So sick of it. It would be like if I did say medicine and every 3 months or so the medical community started tripping over itself by believing in the latest weird quack with orgone energies and magnets and started writing prescriptions to their patients about chakras or astrology and then being shocked, like actually genuinely surprised when it all collapses. Why do people run around like a bunch of frenetic teenagers to manufactured hype cycles in programming? Can we please fucking stop. Honestly.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  I don't view Tailwind as an "abstraction" in the same way that you might say Java is an abstraction over the JVM. If I'm writing Java then I'm only thinking about how Java works, not about the implementation details of the JVM. But when I write Tailwind I'm still very much thinking about the underlying CSS properties. Tailwind just gives me a much more convenient way to add the CSS styles that I already know, with significant reduction to my mental overhead. It hadn't occurred to me that people might be learning Tailwind as if it's a replacement for having to learn or understand CSS. If you treat it that way then you're bound to have a bad time, much like people who treat git as a series of commands to be memorised without any understanding of git's underlying data model. I'll also admit that I've only ever used Tailwind on small-to-medium sized solo projects, so I don't know how it would hold up on a big team. But then the CSS has been an agonising, unmaintainable mess on every big collaborative project I've ever worked on even without Tailwind, so what is there to lose?