4 ms·

I have genuinely never understood Tailwind's value proposition, other than as padding for its developers' CVs, at which I assume it excels. We stopped inlining

I have genuinely never understood Tailwind's value proposition, other than as padding for its developers' CVs, at which I assume it excels. We stopped inlining style attributes for a reason - is this just how the next generation needs to learn?

refulgentis 2y ago
The comparison to inline styles is understandable but misses Tailwind's real value. Inline styles failed because they were arbitrary, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. Tailwind, by contrast, offers a constrained, standardized set of utilities that enforce consistency, simplify maintenance, and reduce CSS complexity. For example, instead of arbitrary inline styles like `style="padding:7px; margin-left:3px; font-size:14px;"`, Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app.
- timr 2y ago
  > Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app. This is literally what bootstrap did/does. You could also trivially do this yourself with just a tiny bit of discipline -- it's part of why variables were valuable in SASS/SCSS. Why must we re-invent CSS to get semantic class names? Like the parent, I have yet to hear an explanation for Tailwind that doesn't sound like "someone who didn't fully understand CSS re-wrote it, and a generation of bootcamp coders adopted it without knowing why, or what came before."
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I didn't say word one about "bootcamp coders." That's all you, pal. Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing?
    - timr 2y ago
      Yeah, I know. That's all me. > Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing? Because it's not "preparadigmatic"? There was a perfectly good paradigm before it was tossed out and re-written in Javascript (and then again in some other language, apparently). There have certainly been some revolutionary paradigms in my career (e.g. the web itself), but this "reinvention" of basic front-end tech doesn't qualify. This stuff holds back the industry. It's part of why software engineers over the age of 30 are considered "old".
      - throwanem 2y ago
        Yes, and it is also what doesn't really appear to happen in mature engineering fields, isn't it? No one is reinventing, I don't know, bolts. Or ohms, or amperes, or how one determines a Young's modulus. In those fields you see incremental refinements; mostly, when you see claims of major revolutions, like the recent flap over supposed high-temperature superconductivity in the "LK-99" material, mostly those receive deep suspicion that typically turns out to be justified, because these are fields where exist sizable, coherent bodies of well-tested and reliably predictive theory whose consequences can for most purposes be taken as known. If there is any similar body of knowledge in this engineering discipline then the discipline still qualifies as preparadigmatic for having developed a paradigm its exponents failed to become competent to transmit. But I think there simply exists next to none of such knowledge. (Even the damned alchemists have their ball-and-stick models! And sure, we have S-expressions, had them for something like seventy years, and do we use them? Do we, hell...) It's how you get people thinking that the web was revolutionary, and not a product of decades and generations of work toward the concept of a global communications network. But the idea that this inchoate condition holds back the industry doesn't seem to me to hold much water. The first boilers blew up a lot too, before the underlying principles were understood, and mere prolonged survival quickly came to be seen as no mean qualification in a steam engineer. How much did that "hold back" the building of railroads, from where the trains were to where the money was? That, if you care to know, is the overarching metaphor with which I like to describe this industry - though I concede the machines we build are not nearly so hazardous to we ourselves. If I had to boil down my entire analysis of this industry to something expressible in a single adjective, the only word to fit would certainly be "irresponsible." But I'll also mention at this time that I topped out at a high-school diploma on a sub-3.0 GPA, so if as the holder of a doctorate you find you begin to become bored or uncomfortable talking with me, experience strongly suggests the option of impugning any or all of my intellect, discipline, character, and decency of motivation in speaking is always available as a resort.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Okay, that's reasonable, I see value there and have worked productively with similar systems in pure CSS and relatively lightweight Sass. The next thing I'd like to see addressed is why something so conceptually straightforward still needs so heavyweight a build step that it has to care what ISA it runs on. (Full disclosure, I haven't worked with Tailwind since 2020 or so. Though I was obviously not too favorably impressed by it, I don't recall it having problems like this then, which if anything I'd expect to have been exacerbated by the Apple CPU architecture transition then ongoing.)

refulgentis 2y ago

The comparison to inline styles is understandable but misses Tailwind's real value. Inline styles failed because they were arbitrary, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. Tailwind, by contrast, offers a constrained, standardized set of utilities that enforce consistency, simplify maintenance, and reduce CSS complexity. For example, instead of arbitrary inline styles like `style="padding:7px; margin-left:3px; font-size:14px;"`, Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app.

timr 2y ago
> Tailwind provides predictable classes like `p-2 ml-1 text-sm`, ensuring uniformity across your app. This is literally what bootstrap did/does. You could also trivially do this yourself with just a tiny bit of discipline -- it's part of why variables were valuable in SASS/SCSS. Why must we re-invent CSS to get semantic class names? Like the parent, I have yet to hear an explanation for Tailwind that doesn't sound like "someone who didn't fully understand CSS re-wrote it, and a generation of bootcamp coders adopted it without knowing why, or what came before."
- throwanem 2y ago
  I didn't say word one about "bootcamp coders." That's all you, pal. Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing?
  - timr 2y ago
    Yeah, I know. That's all me. > Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing? Because it's not "preparadigmatic"? There was a perfectly good paradigm before it was tossed out and re-written in Javascript (and then again in some other language, apparently). There have certainly been some revolutionary paradigms in my career (e.g. the web itself), but this "reinvention" of basic front-end tech doesn't qualify. This stuff holds back the industry. It's part of why software engineers over the age of 30 are considered "old".
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Yes, and it is also what doesn't really appear to happen in mature engineering fields, isn't it? No one is reinventing, I don't know, bolts. Or ohms, or amperes, or how one determines a Young's modulus. In those fields you see incremental refinements; mostly, when you see claims of major revolutions, like the recent flap over supposed high-temperature superconductivity in the "LK-99" material, mostly those receive deep suspicion that typically turns out to be justified, because these are fields where exist sizable, coherent bodies of well-tested and reliably predictive theory whose consequences can for most purposes be taken as known. If there is any similar body of knowledge in this engineering discipline then the discipline still qualifies as preparadigmatic for having developed a paradigm its exponents failed to become competent to transmit. But I think there simply exists next to none of such knowledge. (Even the damned alchemists have their ball-and-stick models! And sure, we have S-expressions, had them for something like seventy years, and do we use them? Do we, hell...) It's how you get people thinking that the web was revolutionary, and not a product of decades and generations of work toward the concept of a global communications network. But the idea that this inchoate condition holds back the industry doesn't seem to me to hold much water. The first boilers blew up a lot too, before the underlying principles were understood, and mere prolonged survival quickly came to be seen as no mean qualification in a steam engineer. How much did that "hold back" the building of railroads, from where the trains were to where the money was? That, if you care to know, is the overarching metaphor with which I like to describe this industry - though I concede the machines we build are not nearly so hazardous to we ourselves. If I had to boil down my entire analysis of this industry to something expressible in a single adjective, the only word to fit would certainly be "irresponsible." But I'll also mention at this time that I topped out at a high-school diploma on a sub-3.0 GPA, so if as the holder of a doctorate you find you begin to become bored or uncomfortable talking with me, experience strongly suggests the option of impugning any or all of my intellect, discipline, character, and decency of motivation in speaking is always available as a resort.
throwanem 2y ago
Okay, that's reasonable, I see value there and have worked productively with similar systems in pure CSS and relatively lightweight Sass. The next thing I'd like to see addressed is why something so conceptually straightforward still needs so heavyweight a build step that it has to care what ISA it runs on. (Full disclosure, I haven't worked with Tailwind since 2020 or so. Though I was obviously not too favorably impressed by it, I don't recall it having problems like this then, which if anything I'd expect to have been exacerbated by the Apple CPU architecture transition then ongoing.)