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You're not learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind. Learn CSS, that will stick with you for the next 20 years. You can't use Tailwind without knowing (

You're not learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind. Learn CSS, that will stick with you for the next 20 years. You can't use Tailwind without knowing (quite a lot of) CSS. There's nothing in Tailwind that makes CSS easier or that obfuscates the technical understanding you need to make things with CSS. If you want to make a horizontal flexbox layout knowing "display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex-wrap: wrap;" or "flex flex-row flex-wrap" are functionally identical. You need to know what either the CSS or the Tailwind classes are doing to use them, and there's a one-to-one mapping between them. If you learn one then you know both. It's literally just a shorthand notation, or in a few places the equivalent of a macro. I don't imagine Tailwind is going to last another 20 years, but I do believe that people will use 'utility first' CSS libraries like it from now on. No one is going back to writing plain CSS unless they have no choice. CSS is becoming increasingly capable, and with that increasing complicated. People choose Tailwind because it affords you all the power of CSS with a somewhat less arcane syntax. Why would anyone stop using that? I do have a caveat though: I actually think Tailwind is the CSS equivalent of jQuery. In 5 years or so a browser is going to add a Tailwind style notation to its engine, and people will be able to use it without needing an external library. In that sense, yes, Tailwind will die, because browser developers will see the benefit is so significant that they'll adopt it as well.

weo3dev 3y ago
Except when using Tailwind, you're learning Tailwind nomenclature and syntax and approach - which really isn't modern CSS, at all. Today's CSS - if anyone would take the time to actually learn it as they do JavaScript - doesn't need something like Tailwind to make it powerful, scalable and manageable. I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise. I don't understand the statement "no one is going back to writing plain CSS" because plain CSS today _is complex_. It is a beast. But it is still "plain" CSS. Yes, it has evolved, it has grown, and it meets today's modern needs with excellent results. CSS nesting is coming up soon: https://caniuse.com/css-nesting https://caniuse.com/css-nesting That will more than likely allow me to migrate any projects I have with Sass still in play, to remove Sass. One more dependency removed. Done. So there's really no need for Tailwind if you know how to build with modern CSS - with the one caveat that if a project _already_ has Tailwind in it, it is a bear to work with/alongside. That to me is the biggest con with Tailwind: it gets in your way when you don't need it.
- onion2k 3y ago
  I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise. I do similar things with Tailwind, making global changes by updating a config file instead of a base CSS file. It's not hard and it works well. To be honest, it's not something that really comes up very often. I don't see this as a particular advantage of Tailwind or CSS. I care much more about the day-to-day dev experience. Prior to using Tailwind I spent about 20 years trying every system you can imagine to manage styles across large websites/apps. I still use the skills I learned when Tailwind doesn't cover an edge case I need. It's fine. Before that I spent about 5 years doing the same with tables and font tags (Adobe Pagemill was awesome). Of all the systems I've used, Tailwind is the easiest to keep neat and tidy. Maybe I'm a terrible dev and other people find CSS really easy to manage, but having spent two decades talking about it with other frontend engineers I'm reasonably certain that's not a common skill. Tailwind makes life much easier for most people.
- andrei_says_ 3y ago
  One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit. The cascade is where the value of CSS comes from! It’s an incredibly powerful concept. I use and love the Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) approach and write a fraction of the CSS code I used to. Having a few utility classes, using variables for project-specific colors, breakpoints, spacing, using fluid typography, grid, and flexbox, make writing well-structured minimal CSS code a pleasure. https://www.xfive.co/blog/itcss-scalable-maintainable-css-architecture https://www.xfive.co/blog/itcss-scalable-maintainable-css-ar... https://utopia.fyi/ https://utopia.fyi/
  - onion2k 3y ago
    One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit. Tailwind styles cascade just like any other CSS rules. No one is ignoring it. The reason it might appear not to is because Tailwind uses layers (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer). Technically it's a polyfill at the moment, but v4 will use the native @layer syntax. If anything Tailwind is actually better at using the cascade than most plain CSS approaches.

weo3dev 3y ago

Except when using Tailwind, you're learning Tailwind nomenclature and syntax and approach - which really isn't modern CSS, at all. Today's CSS - if anyone would take the time to actually learn it as they do JavaScript - doesn't need something like Tailwind to make it powerful, scalable and manageable. I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise. I don't understand the statement "no one is going back to writing plain CSS" because plain CSS today _is complex_. It is a beast. But it is still "plain" CSS. Yes, it has evolved, it has grown, and it meets today's modern needs with excellent results. CSS nesting is coming up soon: https://caniuse.com/css-nesting https://caniuse.com/css-nesting That will more than likely allow me to migrate any projects I have with Sass still in play, to remove Sass. One more dependency removed. Done. So there's really no need for Tailwind if you know how to build with modern CSS - with the one caveat that if a project _already_ has Tailwind in it, it is a bear to work with/alongside. That to me is the biggest con with Tailwind: it gets in your way when you don't need it.

onion2k 3y ago
I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise. I do similar things with Tailwind, making global changes by updating a config file instead of a base CSS file. It's not hard and it works well. To be honest, it's not something that really comes up very often. I don't see this as a particular advantage of Tailwind or CSS. I care much more about the day-to-day dev experience. Prior to using Tailwind I spent about 20 years trying every system you can imagine to manage styles across large websites/apps. I still use the skills I learned when Tailwind doesn't cover an edge case I need. It's fine. Before that I spent about 5 years doing the same with tables and font tags (Adobe Pagemill was awesome). Of all the systems I've used, Tailwind is the easiest to keep neat and tidy. Maybe I'm a terrible dev and other people find CSS really easy to manage, but having spent two decades talking about it with other frontend engineers I'm reasonably certain that's not a common skill. Tailwind makes life much easier for most people.
andrei_says_ 3y ago
One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit. The cascade is where the value of CSS comes from! It’s an incredibly powerful concept. I use and love the Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) approach and write a fraction of the CSS code I used to. Having a few utility classes, using variables for project-specific colors, breakpoints, spacing, using fluid typography, grid, and flexbox, make writing well-structured minimal CSS code a pleasure. https://www.xfive.co/blog/itcss-scalable-maintainable-css-architecture https://www.xfive.co/blog/itcss-scalable-maintainable-css-ar... https://utopia.fyi/ https://utopia.fyi/
- onion2k 3y ago
  One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit. Tailwind styles cascade just like any other CSS rules. No one is ignoring it. The reason it might appear not to is because Tailwind uses layers (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer). Technically it's a polyfill at the moment, but v4 will use the native @layer syntax. If anything Tailwind is actually better at using the cascade than most plain CSS approaches.