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As a dev, I like Tailwind. As a consumer, it has stripped away a lot of how I learned to write websites in the first place. "View Source" is confusing now. Gone

As a dev, I like Tailwind. As a consumer, it has stripped away a lot of how I learned to write websites in the first place. "View Source" is confusing now. Gone are the days of beautiful CSS selectors. Tailwind sacrificed that for dev ux. The next generation will have a harder time learning about web primitives. And htmx is not something I need for these days thankfully. I use phoenix liveview and get away with writing very little pretty dumb code. It's wonderful.

mcintyre1994 3y ago
I hadn’t really thought about that! I guess LiveView kind of does the same because often I’ll look at the network requests of a page to understand/debug stuff and you can’t really do that with LiveView because you just get the HTML updates over the socket.
andirk 3y ago
The whole "name it what its purpose is rather than what it does" like "alert-danger" rather than "giant-red-text" seems to have been thrown out with a lot of Tailwind. It prefers chaos but chaos is so much easier to adjust outliers. Those 2 divs have double the spacing between them? Just take the mx-5 off of one! It's hideous but so easy. Constant find/replace all.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  flex and gap-5 are king
  - andirk 3y ago
    Yes! A few of the many, many, many CSS definitions to get us where `<table>` got us in 1996. See ya later colspan, rowspan.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  You can add your `alert-danger` and whatever you need in `tailwind.config.js` or even directly in your root css file using CSS variables.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    I've tried building design systems into Tailwind config a few times and found it to lose a lot of the potential value of tailwind. Markup is no longer portable without bringing the config with it and devs still need to learn the custom styles and classes we defined, meaning Tailwind knowledge alone doesn't get you up to speed right away.
- gedy 3y ago
  To your example, recent Bootstrap has a mix of component and utility classes that lets you do both "alert-danger mx-0" or whatever. I also avoids the giant size of Tailwind classes that requires that elaborate build/reduction process. You can just include Bootstrap from a CDN or whatever.
  - arcanemachiner 3y ago
    There's also daisyUI, which is sort of like Tailwind + Bootstrap: component-based, but made with Tailwind. Cuts down on the tag soup pretty nicely.
    - gedy 3y ago
      Yes DaisyUI is nice. Ironically, it convinced us not to move from Bootstrap, because we realized its components were almost 1:1 with Bootstrap. And that we actually don't want the infinite styling options that Tailwind offers, so that devs mostly use design system components. At that point, who cares where/what the CSS is?
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
There are probably more webdev tutorials than there were websites back then. The next generation will be fine.

mcintyre1994 3y ago

I hadn’t really thought about that! I guess LiveView kind of does the same because often I’ll look at the network requests of a page to understand/debug stuff and you can’t really do that with LiveView because you just get the HTML updates over the socket.

andirk 3y ago

The whole "name it what its purpose is rather than what it does" like "alert-danger" rather than "giant-red-text" seems to have been thrown out with a lot of Tailwind. It prefers chaos but chaos is so much easier to adjust outliers. Those 2 divs have double the spacing between them? Just take the mx-5 off of one! It's hideous but so easy. Constant find/replace all.

quickthrower2 3y ago
flex and gap-5 are king
- andirk 3y ago
  Yes! A few of the many, many, many CSS definitions to get us where `<table>` got us in 1996. See ya later colspan, rowspan.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
You can add your `alert-danger` and whatever you need in `tailwind.config.js` or even directly in your root css file using CSS variables.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  I've tried building design systems into Tailwind config a few times and found it to lose a lot of the potential value of tailwind. Markup is no longer portable without bringing the config with it and devs still need to learn the custom styles and classes we defined, meaning Tailwind knowledge alone doesn't get you up to speed right away.
gedy 3y ago
To your example, recent Bootstrap has a mix of component and utility classes that lets you do both "alert-danger mx-0" or whatever. I also avoids the giant size of Tailwind classes that requires that elaborate build/reduction process. You can just include Bootstrap from a CDN or whatever.
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  There's also daisyUI, which is sort of like Tailwind + Bootstrap: component-based, but made with Tailwind. Cuts down on the tag soup pretty nicely.
  - gedy 3y ago
    Yes DaisyUI is nice. Ironically, it convinced us not to move from Bootstrap, because we realized its components were almost 1:1 with Bootstrap. And that we actually don't want the infinite styling options that Tailwind offers, so that devs mostly use design system components. At that point, who cares where/what the CSS is?

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

There are probably more webdev tutorials than there were websites back then. The next generation will be fine.