3 ms·

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

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!

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
First, the site uses some weasel language to speak about how much they're "focused on performance" in such a way as you think Tailwind is literally faster than doing normal CSS. It's not. It's a heavy approach and while you can always find edge cases to the contrary, in general it leads to pages that add lag and load to people's devices. If you have a very simple page this doesn't matter, but as your site/business grows, it does. Second, Tailwind obviously promotes a ton of repetition in the same way that using presentational attributes from the 90s and style="" does. This not only adds, again, burden to the CSS engine and DOM, but this "ease of copy pasting" that the author boasts about in the linked blog means you can easily end up with tons of subtle or not so subtle inconsistencies in your site's code and components, UI. Copy pasting is easy. But there's a reason why we define classes, functions, modules, and reuse them, instead of copy-pasting our code everywhere. Copy pasting is a strategy for a quick start and a very short journey as you paste more and more variations of what you're trying to do around your site. Now change them all consistently. Oh shit, I guess... find/replace + regex? This works sometimes, but it's a deeply unserious approach to change management in an application/site at scale, and means your velocity and quality both will suffer. I'm aware of the way to define custom classes as sort of "components" in Tailwind, but at this point... you're literally using Tailwind as you would CSS, but with a ton of indirection, gibberish, and very very unclear precedence/specificity rules. You will also get many people complaining about compilation speed for larger sites. A problem that is quite bizarre to have for styling with a language that doesn't require compilation when you use it in a sane way (and SASS etc. are extremely fast and don't have this problem, there's even a Rust SASS parser I believe, that's even faster). Tailwind also severely restricts your precision and expression. I probably don't have to explain the limitations of inline styles when those styles have to change from user interaction, or for different devices, and container size and so on. Tailwind makes all this extremely bizarre, if it addresses it at all. In "plain" CSS (and other more reasonable tools like SASS), it's trivial.
- TOGoS 3y ago
  I would donate more upvotes to this multi-part tirade if I could. I haven't used Tailwind, or any other CSS framework, because I have never understood why I would want to, having attended a talk about a similar system back in the day where styles were turned into weirdly specific CSS classes, as if they were trying to reinvent font tags. The way you've described it is pretty much what I would expect from such a thing. And yet it's oddly familiar, because all of the 'MVC' frameworks that I've been forced to use and hated[1] seemed to come from the same design philosophy: Throw a bunch of shit code together, then build a cult around it so that people use it whether it makes any sense or not. Laravel's a great example of this because if you search the web for it you'll mostly get results saying that it's "elegant" and "for web artisans", but none of them can explain why it's better than...not using it. They even have some class in there called "Illuminate", which is ironically not very illuminating w.r.t. what the heck it is or does. As if writing code that actually makes any damn sense is everyone's biggest fear and the solution is to acquire a magic wand from one of the Framework Gods that does away with pesky old logic and predictability. "What do you want to do, write everything from scratch?", your coworkers will say, as if we were making computer programs by banging rocks together before Laravel/Rails/Spring/Django/etc came along, and give you a blank stare if you try to explain that writing regular old well-factored OO/functional code is a thing you can do and that slathering culty frameworky paste all over everything doesn't make life any better or your programs any faster, even if said goo has "good documentation", by which they mean lots of activity on Stack Overflow because nobody can figure out how they're supposed to do anything without copy-pasting from some example that mysteriously worked for somebody one time. [1] I don't remember much about the ones I didn't hate, because they did very little and stayed out of the way.
  - jonwinstanley 3y ago
    Hahaha - I wonder if Tailwind is starting to take over from frameworks v no-framework as the best way to start a huge fiery debate on HN!
    - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      Tailwind is extremely polarizing, yes like frameworks, and yes like politics. This polarization tends to happen on the two sides of "reality distortion fields", where someone's propaganda on one side, doesn't match propaganda on the other side. It's like Russians believing the West is the worst, and Putin is there to save them from The Gays. Or the West casually ignoring their impact on Russia with NATO advancing to the doorstep of an old, imperialistic, paranoid regime. What are they supposed to think? But describing this as merely "both sides have equal merit" is really crude. Because more often than not, one side tends to be closer to the truth. Maybe Tailwind has some neat ideas. In fact I'm sure it has some neat ideas. Placed carefully somewhere in the calm eye, the dead center of this tornado of bullshit that is Tailwind overall. But then again, we can't ignore the tornado of bullshit.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

First, the site uses some weasel language to speak about how much they're "focused on performance" in such a way as you think Tailwind is literally faster than doing normal CSS. It's not. It's a heavy approach and while you can always find edge cases to the contrary, in general it leads to pages that add lag and load to people's devices. If you have a very simple page this doesn't matter, but as your site/business grows, it does. Second, Tailwind obviously promotes a ton of repetition in the same way that using presentational attributes from the 90s and style="" does. This not only adds, again, burden to the CSS engine and DOM, but this "ease of copy pasting" that the author boasts about in the linked blog means you can easily end up with tons of subtle or not so subtle inconsistencies in your site's code and components, UI. Copy pasting is easy. But there's a reason why we define classes, functions, modules, and reuse them, instead of copy-pasting our code everywhere. Copy pasting is a strategy for a quick start and a very short journey as you paste more and more variations of what you're trying to do around your site. Now change them all consistently. Oh shit, I guess... find/replace + regex? This works sometimes, but it's a deeply unserious approach to change management in an application/site at scale, and means your velocity and quality both will suffer. I'm aware of the way to define custom classes as sort of "components" in Tailwind, but at this point... you're literally using Tailwind as you would CSS, but with a ton of indirection, gibberish, and very very unclear precedence/specificity rules. You will also get many people complaining about compilation speed for larger sites. A problem that is quite bizarre to have for styling with a language that doesn't require compilation when you use it in a sane way (and SASS etc. are extremely fast and don't have this problem, there's even a Rust SASS parser I believe, that's even faster). Tailwind also severely restricts your precision and expression. I probably don't have to explain the limitations of inline styles when those styles have to change from user interaction, or for different devices, and container size and so on. Tailwind makes all this extremely bizarre, if it addresses it at all. In "plain" CSS (and other more reasonable tools like SASS), it's trivial.

TOGoS 3y ago
I would donate more upvotes to this multi-part tirade if I could. I haven't used Tailwind, or any other CSS framework, because I have never understood why I would want to, having attended a talk about a similar system back in the day where styles were turned into weirdly specific CSS classes, as if they were trying to reinvent font tags. The way you've described it is pretty much what I would expect from such a thing. And yet it's oddly familiar, because all of the 'MVC' frameworks that I've been forced to use and hated[1] seemed to come from the same design philosophy: Throw a bunch of shit code together, then build a cult around it so that people use it whether it makes any sense or not. Laravel's a great example of this because if you search the web for it you'll mostly get results saying that it's "elegant" and "for web artisans", but none of them can explain why it's better than...not using it. They even have some class in there called "Illuminate", which is ironically not very illuminating w.r.t. what the heck it is or does. As if writing code that actually makes any damn sense is everyone's biggest fear and the solution is to acquire a magic wand from one of the Framework Gods that does away with pesky old logic and predictability. "What do you want to do, write everything from scratch?", your coworkers will say, as if we were making computer programs by banging rocks together before Laravel/Rails/Spring/Django/etc came along, and give you a blank stare if you try to explain that writing regular old well-factored OO/functional code is a thing you can do and that slathering culty frameworky paste all over everything doesn't make life any better or your programs any faster, even if said goo has "good documentation", by which they mean lots of activity on Stack Overflow because nobody can figure out how they're supposed to do anything without copy-pasting from some example that mysteriously worked for somebody one time. [1] I don't remember much about the ones I didn't hate, because they did very little and stayed out of the way.
- jonwinstanley 3y ago
  Hahaha - I wonder if Tailwind is starting to take over from frameworks v no-framework as the best way to start a huge fiery debate on HN!
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    Tailwind is extremely polarizing, yes like frameworks, and yes like politics. This polarization tends to happen on the two sides of "reality distortion fields", where someone's propaganda on one side, doesn't match propaganda on the other side. It's like Russians believing the West is the worst, and Putin is there to save them from The Gays. Or the West casually ignoring their impact on Russia with NATO advancing to the doorstep of an old, imperialistic, paranoid regime. What are they supposed to think? But describing this as merely "both sides have equal merit" is really crude. Because more often than not, one side tends to be closer to the truth. Maybe Tailwind has some neat ideas. In fact I'm sure it has some neat ideas. Placed carefully somewhere in the calm eye, the dead center of this tornado of bullshit that is Tailwind overall. But then again, we can't ignore the tornado of bullshit.