4 ms·

Yeah, I've been a fairly vocal curmudgeon about Tailwind within my team. Some folks really like it. They're doing the work and I trust them, so I rolled with it

Yeah, I've been a fairly vocal curmudgeon about Tailwind within my team. Some folks really like it. They're doing the work and I trust them, so I rolled with it. I still have qualms with Tailwind. My classic CSS sensibilities are offended, but whatever. The part that I still don't like is really what this post boils down to: a massively complex build system that creates footguns in the weirdest places. That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in coordination with a complex design system really does feel like it's a win. Seeing that in action was an aha moment where I was able to see value that made some of the tradeoffs worth it.

yurishimo 2y ago
The other thing that people seem to just either forget or ignore is that you can do _both_ things! Tailwind can be used for the areas that it makes sense for, and you can write a sitewide layout using insane (in a good way!) grid declarations using plain old CSS and a few extra classes in your markup. If you're using Vue, you even get a <style> block that can be injected into any component so you're still working in the same context. It's all delightful and optional and you can still do whatever you want.
- douglee650 2y ago
  Yes, exactly. You can use TW for the utility classes and copy-paste-and-go components, and append your own over/under/side-lay layers to create whatever css you want. What about a system that could take a really long TW className and let you give it a single name, and you could still append more TW after for here and there adjustments.
douglee650 2y ago
> That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in coordination with a complex design system really does feel like it's a win. Seeing that in action was an aha moment where I was able to see value that made some of the tradeoffs worth it. Can you elaborate on this a little bit — was there a lot of Figma tooling, plugins to swap variables between systems, etc?

yurishimo 2y ago

The other thing that people seem to just either forget or ignore is that you can do _both_ things! Tailwind can be used for the areas that it makes sense for, and you can write a sitewide layout using insane (in a good way!) grid declarations using plain old CSS and a few extra classes in your markup. If you're using Vue, you even get a <style> block that can be injected into any component so you're still working in the same context. It's all delightful and optional and you can still do whatever you want.

douglee650 2y ago
Yes, exactly. You can use TW for the utility classes and copy-paste-and-go components, and append your own over/under/side-lay layers to create whatever css you want. What about a system that could take a really long TW className and let you give it a single name, and you could still append more TW after for here and there adjustments.

douglee650 2y ago

> That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in coordination with a complex design system really does feel like it's a win. Seeing that in action was an aha moment where I was able to see value that made some of the tradeoffs worth it. Can you elaborate on this a little bit — was there a lot of Figma tooling, plugins to swap variables between systems, etc?