5 ms·

It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in syne

It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal. Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man, who is convinced they've discovered the secret of the Universe. And that secret is compiling absurdly large, GIGANTIC lists of CSS rules, trying to reinvent the concept of a "syntax" within the constraints of an identifier name, then copy-pasting them inline all over your HTML code, with great redundancy and repetition, obscuring the actual DOM, and then treeshaking the gigantic class lists, so your browser doesn't immediately crash while opening a basic homepage. It's good because projects like Tailwind are built on marketing and emotion, they rely on ignorance and the web design equivalent of a "get rich quick" scheme that promises great results with no effort or skill, they seek to be viral, and when they succeed, engineering arguments about the merits of good design, or even basic logic cease to have any effect, and then these projects realign the rest of the community, so you see other projects "built on Tailwind", often not even for any reason other than it's cool to be built on Tailwind. So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop. And when they pop, the damage and loss of value and productivity is immense. Having to redo big parts of an ecosystem, so you can scrub away all the millions icky sticky pieces of Tailwind mania off things, that is splattered on everything, and the smell is completely unbearable. So. When the bubble of BS stops growing, and starts shrinking, without massive damage: it's good. It's good. ^_O

jonwinstanley 3y ago
I'm not sure I fully agree with your view on what tailwind is and why it is growing. In my opinion, tailwind is gaining some popularity because some people find it faster and easier to use than writing traditional CSS files. I realise it also has some downsides, and seeing all those class names in the html is particularly ugly, but if the people using it got their project out faster, then surely there is a place for it?
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on. One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly. This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family. Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter? Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win. If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?
  - jonwinstanley 3y ago
    What makes you think tailwind would be hell in the future though? It's just a load of classes on html elements. Maintenance is pretty easy. I do agree with you on the headline though, of course tailwind hasn't won anything!
scrollaway 3y ago
> Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man My dear pot, you should meet my friend Kettle. Really, this is a lot of text that sums up your personal preferences as to why you don't like Tailwind. Nothing concretely objective here. And, by the way, I agree with some of it! But you're also ignoring Tailwind is used by massive, engineer-first companies (such as Stripe), and the engineers in question actually like working with Tailwind. This idea that people who use Tailwind hate it is obvious nonsense, and it's always a significant tell that someone hasn't really produced anything with it when they start claiming that about others.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Stripe is not a dude, it's a company of many people with different skills in different areas. I also often wonder how OpenAI has a team that can create the world's top AI model currently, and yet their front-end chat app and plugin model has basic injections, usability issues, accidental user information disclosures and other novice bugs, but there you go. I guess it's possible to have a company skilled in something and stupid in another. I think my critique was sufficiently detailed, but if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code.
  - TOGoS 3y ago
    > if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code. No need for Tailwind; in enterprisey Java land we already have Hibernate and Spring Boot for those who like long, magical method names. And if you want an extra layer of obfuscation, drop Lombok in there.
rendall 3y ago
> So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop. Ah, just like React!
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  Kinda. If React dies I'll be sad. While most of React is BS, the "ReactDOM" component, the Virtual DOM model that is applied to the real DOM by "delta" diff, is a solid concept that deserved to live. Unfortunately we do tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, when we decide something is uncool. We're a very stupid species.
  - jonwinstanley 3y ago
    When has anything in tech ever actually died? I guess there will be people building sites in React forever. Haha
    - arrowsmith 3y ago
      Does anyone, anywhere still use Coffeescript?
      - jonwinstanley 3y ago
        Hahaha. Ok yes, there definitely are also some things that die.
        3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
        First time: someone's opinion actually changed as a result of a brief Internet argument.
SkyMarshal 3y ago
> It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal. Are there any CSS frameworks that are the opposite of this?
miragecraft 3y ago
Tailwind may be madness, but it’s manageable and maintainable madness. The alternative is not sanity, but simply unmaintainable madness.

jonwinstanley 3y ago

I'm not sure I fully agree with your view on what tailwind is and why it is growing. In my opinion, tailwind is gaining some popularity because some people find it faster and easier to use than writing traditional CSS files. I realise it also has some downsides, and seeing all those class names in the html is particularly ugly, but if the people using it got their project out faster, then surely there is a place for it?

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on. One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly. This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family. Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter? Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win. If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?
- jonwinstanley 3y ago
  What makes you think tailwind would be hell in the future though? It's just a load of classes on html elements. Maintenance is pretty easy. I do agree with you on the headline though, of course tailwind hasn't won anything!

scrollaway 3y ago

> Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man My dear pot, you should meet my friend Kettle. Really, this is a lot of text that sums up your personal preferences as to why you don't like Tailwind. Nothing concretely objective here. And, by the way, I agree with some of it! But you're also ignoring Tailwind is used by massive, engineer-first companies (such as Stripe), and the engineers in question actually like working with Tailwind. This idea that people who use Tailwind hate it is obvious nonsense, and it's always a significant tell that someone hasn't really produced anything with it when they start claiming that about others.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Stripe is not a dude, it's a company of many people with different skills in different areas. I also often wonder how OpenAI has a team that can create the world's top AI model currently, and yet their front-end chat app and plugin model has basic injections, usability issues, accidental user information disclosures and other novice bugs, but there you go. I guess it's possible to have a company skilled in something and stupid in another. I think my critique was sufficiently detailed, but if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code.
- TOGoS 3y ago
  > if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code. No need for Tailwind; in enterprisey Java land we already have Hibernate and Spring Boot for those who like long, magical method names. And if you want an extra layer of obfuscation, drop Lombok in there.

rendall 3y ago

> So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop. Ah, just like React!

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Kinda. If React dies I'll be sad. While most of React is BS, the "ReactDOM" component, the Virtual DOM model that is applied to the real DOM by "delta" diff, is a solid concept that deserved to live. Unfortunately we do tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, when we decide something is uncool. We're a very stupid species.
- jonwinstanley 3y ago
  When has anything in tech ever actually died? I guess there will be people building sites in React forever. Haha
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    Does anyone, anywhere still use Coffeescript?
    - jonwinstanley 3y ago
      Hahaha. Ok yes, there definitely are also some things that die.
      - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
        First time: someone's opinion actually changed as a result of a brief Internet argument.

SkyMarshal 3y ago

> It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal. Are there any CSS frameworks that are the opposite of this?

miragecraft 3y ago

Tailwind may be madness, but it’s manageable and maintainable madness. The alternative is not sanity, but simply unmaintainable madness.