5 ms·

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a

One thing that has always struck me about Tailwind is that practically every argument its proponents use more or less boils down to “I never learnt CSS beyond a junior level”. It’s super common to hear Tailwind advocates say things like “Without Tailwind, we would just have one big disorganised CSS file that always grows uncontrollably and ends up with loads of obsolete stuff in it and !important everywhere! Tailwind is so much better!”. CSS is a skill just like any other technical skill. If all you do is learn the bare minimum so you can bodge things until you get something that looks right, then your ambitions are going to outpace your ability to keep things organised very quickly.

chistev 5mo ago
Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?
- JimDabell 5mo ago
  > Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? No, I don’t think that’s the case at all.
- reaperducer 5mo ago
  Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale? I think that was true at the beginning. But Tailwind is quickly approaching the multi-headed hydra it was trying to replace.
  - 9dev 5mo ago
    What exactly has changed about Tailwind in, like, years? There are a few more properties for new CSS features, a few convenience features (like size-x instead of w-x h-x for the same values of x), but other than that? If you've grown accustomed to the utility classes eight years ago, then disappeared under a rock until today, you should be able to continue working in an unrelated, Tailwind-using project immediately.
timr 5mo ago
It's worse than that; the common arguments for Tailwind literally derive from total ignorance of how CSS is made to work, and a disposal of guidelines that developers would worship in any other context (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself). It's really frustrating to be talking with someone about Tailwind and CSS, and realize that not only do they not know what "cascading" means, they never even considered the concept might be useful in the context of a stylesheet.
- u_fucking_dork 5mo ago
  The common arguments against Tailwind usually derive from total ignorance of working with CSS on large scale projects with many team members. And when this is pointed out you’ll usually get replies that just hand wave it away as not a problem, as if things like BEM were invented for no reason.
  - timr 5mo ago
    Yeah, that's a straw-man. I've worked on large-scale projects with many team members, and it's perfectly possible to use CSS as it was designed. But sure, like most tools, it starts with understanding how it works.
    - pverheggen 5mo ago
      Sure, but "total ignorance of how CSS is made to work" is also a straw man.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - 9dev 5mo ago
      Sure it's possible, but is it possible for everyone on your team? Including the new hire, the interns, or the now-vibecoding managers? Sooner or later it deteriorates.
      - 5mo ago
bdcravens 5mo ago
Isn't the same true of those who use a library that wraps SQL?
- chaosharmonic 5mo ago
  I would think manipulating CSS through user input is both less common as an application pattern and less critical as an attack surface.
- fg137 5mo ago
  I think there is a wide spectrum of "wrapping SQL", and very likely not because someone doesn't know SQL well. Depending on the use case, it can be just the right solution or overkill. Tailwind, on the other hand, attempts to address a different set of problems, but I am not getting into that here -- other comments have summarized it well.
throwawaysleep 5mo ago
That’s the value of tailwind. You can just skip learning CSS and still get a good result. The benefit to learning it is marginal.
- fg137 5mo ago
  > You can just skip learning CSS It works until doesn't, and you'll have to figure out what's going on with your code.
chaosharmonic 5mo ago
Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a little less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning HTML beyond a junior level. It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `<div>` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is. And that contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser. A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is JavaScript -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.
- chaosharmonic 5mo ago
  I should probably note a detail I left out here: I myself care a lot about standards, and simply am stating that I wouldn't push teams around me to suddenly drop Tailwind even if I personally would rather not have to rely on things like it everywhere. Less that my opinion goes away and more that I don't presume it's the only valid option at scale. But in my personal projects, I myself have just stopped using libraries entirely for styling.
romanhn 5mo ago
The more experienced Tailwind proponents probably have better things to do than get dragged into yet another online flamewar :) I've done tons of CSS since the 90s before looking into Tailwind. After it clicked, I've mostly tried to avoid raw CSS. In a sense, you exchange one mess for another. Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. Both can be implemented cleanly, but I'd much rather clean up a Tailwind mess than a CSS one. And I find the development process much more enjoyable overall.
- codethief 5mo ago
  > Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm a huge fan of locality (both in software engineering and in physis) but you can also "localize" your styles by scoping them appropriately. (Modern frontend frameworks typically do that automatically for you at the component level.) There is no need to use Tailwind for that.
  - mplewis 5mo ago
    Yes, you could build your own framework to localize your styles. Or you could just use Tailwind.
    - codethief 5mo ago
      You're misunderstanding me. I never said you should build a framework. I said frontend frameworks already provide style locality out of the box, so there is no need to introduce an additional framework (Tailwind) for that.
  - codethief 5mo ago
    > both in software engineering and in physis I meant physics of course!
Merad 5mo ago
You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.
- jim33442 5mo ago
  This is where I'm at. React makes sense to me in ways that plain CSS doesn't. I've learned about 15 programming languages by now, each time out of necessity, but CSS isn't one of them.
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
    Josh Comeau had a good course on CSS, I've used that to learn CSS from scratch.
fg137 5mo ago
Your comment is getting downvotes, not necessarily because you are wrong, but 1) CSS is indeed hard, complex and often confusing, which is partly why Tailwind exists in the first place 2) your comment points out some inconvenient facts, and people don't like that
stephen 5mo ago
"beyond a junior level" -- I doubt this will change your mind, but this post is from the author of Tachyons, a "pre-Tailwinds" competitor that didn't get the same traction: https://mrmrs.cc/writing/scalable-css/ https://mrmrs.cc/writing/scalable-css/ And the tldr is that he downloaded and read the CSS for several major websites at the time (post is from 2016) and they were all hodge-podge of terribleness. Maybe all the devs writing that CSS were junior, but imo it's more than CSS just doesn't have the abstractions to match the level of OCD/bespokeness that designers spec into every Figma -- move this box by _this_ much / _that_ much / etc.
halapro 5mo ago
I'm a big hater of Tailwind but also know that most CSS out there is an absolutely clusterf of outdated rules and !important wars. There's no winning when some dude jumps into the codebase and fixes a bug by adding margin-right to "p" CSS linters never really picked up steam and even with them, what's lintable is quite limited.
eviks 5mo ago
Do you have an actual list of arguments with the steps you take to boil them down to ignorance? CSS is a design system, as like any system it can be poorly designed. Poorly designed systems require more effort to operate, and you can even call that "skills", but that just ignores the core issue of comparing design of those systems

chistev 5mo ago

Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale?

JimDabell 5mo ago
> Isn't Tailwind easy to understand when you look at the codebase, rather than putting in more effort to learn a pure CSS codebase? No, I don’t think that’s the case at all.
reaperducer 5mo ago
Isn't that part of the argument of Tailwind being easier to scale? I think that was true at the beginning. But Tailwind is quickly approaching the multi-headed hydra it was trying to replace.
- 9dev 5mo ago
  What exactly has changed about Tailwind in, like, years? There are a few more properties for new CSS features, a few convenience features (like size-x instead of w-x h-x for the same values of x), but other than that? If you've grown accustomed to the utility classes eight years ago, then disappeared under a rock until today, you should be able to continue working in an unrelated, Tailwind-using project immediately.

timr 5mo ago

It's worse than that; the common arguments for Tailwind literally derive from total ignorance of how CSS is made to work, and a disposal of guidelines that developers would worship in any other context (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself). It's really frustrating to be talking with someone about Tailwind and CSS, and realize that not only do they not know what "cascading" means, they never even considered the concept might be useful in the context of a stylesheet.

u_fucking_dork 5mo ago
The common arguments against Tailwind usually derive from total ignorance of working with CSS on large scale projects with many team members. And when this is pointed out you’ll usually get replies that just hand wave it away as not a problem, as if things like BEM were invented for no reason.
- timr 5mo ago
  Yeah, that's a straw-man. I've worked on large-scale projects with many team members, and it's perfectly possible to use CSS as it was designed. But sure, like most tools, it starts with understanding how it works.
  - pverheggen 5mo ago
    Sure, but "total ignorance of how CSS is made to work" is also a straw man.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - 9dev 5mo ago
    Sure it's possible, but is it possible for everyone on your team? Including the new hire, the interns, or the now-vibecoding managers? Sooner or later it deteriorates.
    - 5mo ago

bdcravens 5mo ago

Isn't the same true of those who use a library that wraps SQL?

chaosharmonic 5mo ago
I would think manipulating CSS through user input is both less common as an application pattern and less critical as an attack surface.
fg137 5mo ago
I think there is a wide spectrum of "wrapping SQL", and very likely not because someone doesn't know SQL well. Depending on the use case, it can be just the right solution or overkill. Tailwind, on the other hand, attempts to address a different set of problems, but I am not getting into that here -- other comments have summarized it well.

throwawaysleep 5mo ago

That’s the value of tailwind. You can just skip learning CSS and still get a good result. The benefit to learning it is marginal.

fg137 5mo ago
> You can just skip learning CSS It works until doesn't, and you'll have to figure out what's going on with your code.

chaosharmonic 5mo ago

Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a little less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning HTML beyond a junior level. It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `<div>` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is. And that contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser. A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is JavaScript -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.

chaosharmonic 5mo ago
I should probably note a detail I left out here: I myself care a lot about standards, and simply am stating that I wouldn't push teams around me to suddenly drop Tailwind even if I personally would rather not have to rely on things like it everywhere. Less that my opinion goes away and more that I don't presume it's the only valid option at scale. But in my personal projects, I myself have just stopped using libraries entirely for styling.

romanhn 5mo ago

The more experienced Tailwind proponents probably have better things to do than get dragged into yet another online flamewar :) I've done tons of CSS since the 90s before looking into Tailwind. After it clicked, I've mostly tried to avoid raw CSS. In a sense, you exchange one mess for another. Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. Both can be implemented cleanly, but I'd much rather clean up a Tailwind mess than a CSS one. And I find the development process much more enjoyable overall.

codethief 5mo ago
> Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. That seems like a false dichotomy. I'm a huge fan of locality (both in software engineering and in physis) but you can also "localize" your styles by scoping them appropriately. (Modern frontend frameworks typically do that automatically for you at the component level.) There is no need to use Tailwind for that.
- mplewis 5mo ago
  Yes, you could build your own framework to localize your styles. Or you could just use Tailwind.
  - codethief 5mo ago
    You're misunderstanding me. I never said you should build a framework. I said frontend frameworks already provide style locality out of the box, so there is no need to introduce an additional framework (Tailwind) for that.
- codethief 5mo ago
  > both in software engineering and in physis I meant physics of course!

Merad 5mo ago

You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.

jim33442 5mo ago
This is where I'm at. React makes sense to me in ways that plain CSS doesn't. I've learned about 15 programming languages by now, each time out of necessity, but CSS isn't one of them.
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Josh Comeau had a good course on CSS, I've used that to learn CSS from scratch.

fg137 5mo ago

Your comment is getting downvotes, not necessarily because you are wrong, but 1) CSS is indeed hard, complex and often confusing, which is partly why Tailwind exists in the first place 2) your comment points out some inconvenient facts, and people don't like that

stephen 5mo ago

"beyond a junior level" -- I doubt this will change your mind, but this post is from the author of Tachyons, a "pre-Tailwinds" competitor that didn't get the same traction: https://mrmrs.cc/writing/scalable-css/ https://mrmrs.cc/writing/scalable-css/ And the tldr is that he downloaded and read the CSS for several major websites at the time (post is from 2016) and they were all hodge-podge of terribleness. Maybe all the devs writing that CSS were junior, but imo it's more than CSS just doesn't have the abstractions to match the level of OCD/bespokeness that designers spec into every Figma -- move this box by _this_ much / _that_ much / etc.

halapro 5mo ago

I'm a big hater of Tailwind but also know that most CSS out there is an absolutely clusterf of outdated rules and !important wars. There's no winning when some dude jumps into the codebase and fixes a bug by adding margin-right to "p" CSS linters never really picked up steam and even with them, what's lintable is quite limited.

eviks 5mo ago

Do you have an actual list of arguments with the steps you take to boil them down to ignorance? CSS is a design system, as like any system it can be poorly designed. Poorly designed systems require more effort to operate, and you can even call that "skills", but that just ignores the core issue of comparing design of those systems