Tailwind CSS v4.0

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwindcss-v4

by g3eorge • 1 year ago

468 286 1 year ago

rglullis12• 1 year ago

"Build times reduced", "no more @tailwind directives", "No more js configuration", "Designed for the modern web".

To me, this screams "CSS now can do everything we used to do ourselves, but let's keep pretending that we are still needed somehow"

bitpush• 1 year ago

Really!? Is that really what you got out of it?

I understand you're not a fan of Tailwind, so perhaps say what you dont like about Tailwind instead of creating a strawman and attacking it.

Also, shame on you for poo-pooing on someone else's open source project and people find useful.

mc3301• 1 year ago

Yeah, I tried (not so hard) to like and use tailwind, but I've been using bootstrap for so long, and for my very simple needs, bootstrap was a better choice. But I wouldn't go around saying, "tailwind is unnecessary for everyone."

rglullis12• 1 year ago

"What I don't like about Tailwind" has less to do with Tailwind itself and more about the violation of separation of content and presentation that they push so hard.

poo-pooing on someone else's open source project

This is not some young kid doing free software out of kindness. This is a company making millions of dollars in revenue in a closed source product (tailwind UI), which is built on a foundation (tailwindCSS) that is becoming less and less needed.

crummy• 1 year ago

What did you need Tailwind for before that you couldn't do in normal CSS? Doesn't Tailwind map pretty much 1:1 to CSS?

ervine2• 1 year ago

Yes.

BeetleB4• 1 year ago

Doesn't Tailwind map pretty much 1:1 to CSS?

Much of it does, but not all of it.

rayrrr2• 1 year ago

Every programming language maps 1:1 to CPU instruction sets, but very few humans want to speak CPU language directly…hope that helps.

dankobgd• 1 year ago

It's a horrible way to do what css can do but in a dumber way with added tooling. It is used by people that don't know css and this is where the problems start

crooked-v• 1 year ago

"Basically just inline CSS, but less fiddly and much more optimizable than the style attribute" was always the selling point of Tailwind in the first place.

rglullis12• 1 year ago

Then, yes. But nowadays CSS is a lot more powerful and has caught up. So why bother with Tailwind?

Sateeshm4• 1 year ago

But it's not just inline css though. The length of inline css string would almost always be 3 times longer than tailwind classes string.

Also inline css doesn't allow media queries, pseudo classes, etc., which is a big deal.

crowcroft3• 1 year ago

If you going to hate on it, at least try understand what it is and why people use it.

rglullis12• 1 year ago

It's not "hate". It's just that I don't see the value that it brings today.

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Thanks Tailwind devs! It’s a testament to the success of the concept and the quality and consistency of execution over a seriously long time, that Tailwind became how LLMs write code for the web.

Congrats on the release.

harlanlewis• 1 year ago

Yes, I’m a huge fan of how easy it is to whip up quick isolated prototypes in Claude artifacts.

There’s a risk of breaking changes in libs causing frustration in larger codebases, though. I’ve been working with LLMs in a Nextjs App Router codebase for about a year, and regularly struggle with models trained primarily on the older Pages Router. LLMs often produce incompatible or even mixed compatibility code. It really doesn’t matter which side of the fence your code is on, both are polluted by the other. More recent and more powerful models are getting better, but even SOTA reasoning models don’t totally solve this.

Lately I’ve taken to regularly including a text file that spells out various dependency versions and why they matter in LLM context, but there’s only so much it can do currently to overcome the weight of training on dated material. I imagine tools like Cursor will get better at doing that for us silently in the future.

There’s an interesting tension brewing between keeping dependencies up to date, especially in the volatile and brittle front end world, vs writing code the LLMs are trained on.

pupppet• 1 year ago

I appreciate there are people who find Tailwind useful and are productive with it, but it has this clean yet generic look that I now see everywhere, because Tailwind is now everywhere.

sadmanca2• 1 year ago

I feel like that's a good thing, because Tailwind's options are well-thought and work well.

I like to think of it in the same way as Inter being the new Helvetica when it comes to choosing a font for a website: lots of people do it, and it looks great, so why not?

Sateeshm4• 1 year ago

Tailwind gives you sensible defaults, but doesn't really influence your design too much. People just tend to design the sites a certain way. Especially, with ShadCn.

gkoberger• 1 year ago

This is conflating Tailwind and TailwindUI/shadcn/etc.

For the most part, Tailwind offers no more influence over style than normal CSS (okay, there's some exceptions... things like shadows are a bit more standardized, and indigo has gotten outside influence on color palettes as of late).

harrall• 1 year ago

I heard this comment about Bootstrap back this in the day but none of my Bootstrap sites looked like each other. Bootstrap saved me a lot of time because it had a lot of utility classes (like Tailwind way before Tailwind) and it never enforced a certain look.

You just loaded the classes that you wanted (unless you didn’t download the source Sass files, but that would have been silly).

Zanfa• 1 year ago

The same way everything looked like Bootstrap a decade ago.

cloverich2• 1 year ago

My take on this problem is, good UI frameworks (i.e. tailwind + components) are still rare. So the vast majority of projects use a very small number of them. If 4-5 new quality UI projects popped up, especially if they departed more in their styling, we'd see more diversity.

I've come to realize with design, like much creative work, the trends really do seem to be set by a shockingly small number of people. I wish more people realized this, because I feel there are talented individuals out there not making their own, thinking they'll never be heard. But I suspect some of those people would be unlocking new UI's for a large chunk of the web if they would give it a go.

nakovet• 1 year ago

I love tailwind, used in 3 projects in the past 4 years, it’s intuitive, well documented, simple. I don’t miss the days of emotion and styled components where I would have to think of a name for every styled div in the project, with tailwind a container is just a div and a few classes nothing else. Less bike shedding discussion, less brain cycles spent naming things, less time wasted in reviews.

notjoemama2• 1 year ago

a few classes

You must be working with very good product owners then. The ones I've worked with love to specify the hell out of every possible detail. Like a web form is their personal HGTV renovation. I tried tailwind once and the classes ended up being an order of magnitude more than the markup. It got hard to read, quickly.

lowercased• 1 year ago

you can use @apply to merge the various utility classes together in to something resembling a name, like

.btn-primary { @apply py-2 px-5 bg-violet-500 text-white font-semibold rounded-full shadow-md hover:bg-violet-700 focus:outline-none focus:ring focus:ring-violet-400 focus:ring-opacity-75; }

But their v3 docs seem to be very against this.

"Whatever you do, don’t use @apply just to make things look “cleaner”. Yes, HTML templates littered with Tailwind classes are kind of ugly. Making changes in a project that has tons of custom CSS is worse."

Reasons:

* You have to think up class names all the time — nothing will slow you down or drain your energy like coming up with a class name for something that doesn’t deserve to be named.

* You have to jump between multiple files to make changes — which is a way bigger workflow killer than you’d think before co-locating everything together.

* Changing styles is scarier — CSS is global, are you sure you can change the min-width value in that class without breaking something in another part of the site?

Yet... my experience using projects that use tailwind is that every button everywhere is styled the same way, but it's repeated in multiple areas. The 'kinda ugly' part, but also... it's repeated in multiple places. Trying to change the universal focus behaviour of buttons in a project like this is hard, because... I can't search focus:outline-none without finding everything that has 'focus:outline-none' on it. I can't just search/replace, because it'll impact other stuff.

So I end up spending way too much time trawling through way too many scattered specific styles all over a codebase, vs having a defined 'btn' style someplace. "well, that's just the project's fault"... possibly, but it seems to be the promoted/preferred/evangelized way of using tailwind, judging by the projects I've had to get involved with the past few years. IME, this approach may have good short term benefits, but poorer longer term maintenance, doubly so when the original people are no longer involved in the project, and outsiders have to come in to deal with it.

Aeolun4• 1 year ago

I generally use tailwind in combination with daisyui, and I don’t think about styling a lot any more beyond choosing the proper theme.

dbbk5• 1 year ago

I don’t miss the days of emotion and styled components where I would have to think of a name for every styled div in the project

I see people mention this issue fairly frequently, and it puzzles me a little. I have never once spent probably more than 1 second thinking about what to name something. Is it actually a blocker for some people? Are you really paralysed by this?

agos5• 1 year ago

especially since with any decent CSS solution (any css in js, or CSS modules) you can reuse names

gausswho• 1 year ago

There was a time when BEM ruled (and scarred) the world. But names aren't a problem if you abandon the C in CSS and scope all styles to component.

fintechie• 1 year ago

Gave it a go for several projects, but didn't like it... for big projects it gets messy, fast. It also feels like it has become the new bootstrap.

I'm very happy with my current CSS-in-JS workflow. Crafting good old css with LLM help. You just show the LLM a pic, ask for the components.... boom, done (with proper naming, etc)

_heimdall5• 1 year ago

This is actually one of the main reasons I avoid react when I have the option. Styling in react is terrible, I'll use tailwind with it but only as the least bad option.

If I am using a frontend framework and a build step, svelte and astro are nice depending on the use case. I can style with plain old CSS and rarely have to reach for class names, if you keep components small you can get away with element selectors and let the framework scope styles at build time.

sadmanca2• 1 year ago

Heck yeah, cool to see Tailwind add support for transitions without Javascript.

As a burgeoning web developer, dealing with animation libraries seems like it's not worth the effort (or at least not for something as simple as a blog), so this is much appreciated.

atonse2• 1 year ago

Looking forward to integrating this into my elixir projects!

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Title is: Tailwind CSS v4.0

davidw2• 1 year ago

Question for people who are good at CSS stuff. I am not.

I'm upgrading a personal Phoenix project to 1.7, and Phoenix now uses Tailwind by default. So I thought I'd try and update my one page thing to use it instead of Bootstrap.

So far, it looks like crap whereas the Bootstrap one looked 'good enough'.

What's the easiest way to get something that looks kinda sorta decent, with some nice defaults, without trying to become a designer?

Or should I just reinstall Bootstrap and be done with this.

bitshaker• 1 year ago

Put your HEEx into a LLM. They understand both Bootstrap and Tailwind very well. It will probably not be too hard.

moojacob• 1 year ago

If your looking for components like bootstrap try https://flowbite.com/ for free. Tailwind also has paid components. You just copy and paste. The cool part is once you get more comfortable you can start to tweak the flowbite components.

bushido• 1 year ago

Tailwind and Bootstrap and are kinda apple vs apple pie. Tailwind provides classes that still need to be stacked to build components.

It'd be easier if you were using some source for UI components, I've used TailwindUI in the past, but that's paid. I'm sure there are good free alternatives.

bebop• 1 year ago

A friend of mine who is good at these things recommended https://mantine.dev/

kyleee• 1 year ago

I’d say it depends on who is paying you. If you have job security and want to tinker, then play with tailwind if you want (most trendy / loud people seem to like tailwind). If however you are working on your own project / are self funded / or have a deadline just stick with bootstrap that you know, and focus on getting your work done instead of bike shedding on the UI

newusertoday• 1 year ago

reinstall bootstrap and be done with it. You can look at daisyui it is closest to bootstrap. There is also shadcn ui, ui looks good but it would take you effort to port styles to your phoenix project.

floydnoel2• 1 year ago

I use DaisyUI to accomplish that goal, here is my demo site for an example: https://nwk-landing-kit.netlify.app

and here are the docs for DasiyUI: https://daisyui.com

davidw2• 1 year ago

The DaisyUI description of the Tailwind button made me laugh:

"bg-indigo-600 px-4 py-3 text-center text-sm font-semibold inline-block text-white cursor-pointer uppercase transition duration-200 ease-in-out rounded-md hover:bg-indigo-700 focus-visible:outline-none focus-visible:ring-2 focus-visible:ring-indigo-600 focus-visible:ring-offset-2 active:scale-95"

Yeah, that's not making my life easier is it. Also some of those class names are super cryptic.

jmull2• 1 year ago

Or should I just reinstall Bootstrap and be done with this.

That one.

Tailwind gives you tools when you want to control the design, but you’ve got to control the design.

When you just want something that looks good and don’t mind that bootstrap-y feel, bootstrap is the way to go.

(There are projects that essentially recreate bootstrap on top of tailwind, which, in theory, might give you something like bootstrap as a starting point with the power of tailwind, but I haven’t seen it work better in practice than just using bootstrap.)

ricw• 1 year ago

Disagree.

Just get one of the tailwind UX kits and use their classes as your standard style guide. I personally use flowise as it’s free with paid more complex components if needed, but there are a bunch of others out there that fill the same space.

darkhorse132• 1 year ago

You can check out Halfmoon too instead of Bootstrap: https://www.gethalfmoon.com/

iansinnott• 1 year ago

Migration guide, if anyone is wondering: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/upgrade-guide

Some breaking changes in there. May want to hold off on upgrading until LLMs come around to writing v4 code with ease.

NiloCK• 1 year ago

This reservation has taken firm hold on me and has made me a slower adopter of shiny new things.

I feel alright about it from a local perspective (I'm a lot more productive now than I was before), but I do wonder what it does to the overall dynamic and incentive to write shiny new things or generally update the ecosystem.

The LLMs will get more powerful, but to what extent will their work be dominated by existing tools (with lots of existent human-generated exemplar)?

hipadev23• 1 year ago

LLMs have already plateaued in knowledge imo.

There’s far less reason for humans to contribute code examples, answer questions, work on open-source projects, or even produce content knowing it’ll immediately be slurped up and resold.

Web dev will be stuck with React and Tailwind circa 2021 for a very long time.

verdverm• 1 year ago

We shouldn't really have to retrain models for them to be able to work with new versions of libraries or frameworks. That seems like a flaw in the LLM (only?) setup. One should probably be using RAG at a minimum to pull in the correct documentation and references. Something like Kapa, but not limited to a single project https://www.kapa.ai/

koito17• 1 year ago

Renaming utilities like flex-shrink-* makes existing LLMs emit deprecated code today and broken code tomorrow. I wonder what the rationale is behind the renaming of various utilities (e.g. shadow-sm -> shadow-xs, flex-shrink -> shrink, decoration-slice -> box-decoration-slice, ...)

In new projects, I will probably use Tailwind v4 and constantly provide the upgrade guide as context to an LLM. In existing projects, I will continue to use Tailwind v3 until I am certain that it works alongside the tools used by my framework (React Router / Remix).

todd3834• 1 year ago

I’m a recent convert to tailwind. I’m very comfortable with css and I was initially turned off on the huge horizontal lines I saw in tailwind projects.

However, more and more component libraries are based on tailwind so I decided to try some immersion therapy.

Here are the top things I enjoy that was not obvious to me:

1. The class names are css shortcuts. Using them save you a lot of time. This is probably obvious to anyone who’s seriously looked at tailwind but I didn’t see that browsing the docs. I just saw nightmarishly long lines.

2. The lines look longer when you are not familiar with the class names. I initially pulled all of my class names out into a string outside my markup and included similar to how I’m used to using emotioncss. This made tailwind tolerable for me at first. However after several days I started to feel less turned off by those lines. I think it’s because I could recognize them. I will still break down a line with something like clsx.

3. clsx helps so much vs trying to entirely rely on tailwind syntax. The docs don’t discourage this at all but for some reason I thought it wasn’t idiomatic tailwind at first.

4. My app has to support a very large number of themes. Tailwind has proven to be a very attractive way of solving this problem. CSS variables are cool but the long syntax of using them is helped a lot in tailwind.

5. Adding my own custom variants is so easy and made me feel like a power user with such a small learning curve.

All of this is just my two cents to guide anyone who is like me watching from the sideline and wondering why? Why would anyone ever want to tolerate those “disgusting long lines mixed into the html”. Neo, all I see is the lady in the red dress now

Sateeshm4• 1 year ago

It's sort of like javascript devs ignoring typescript because they never felt like they needed it. But once you start using it, it's difficult to go back.

I was in never ts/tailwind gang for a few years until I tried them.

jaredcwhite• 1 year ago

As a once-strident critic of Tailwind for its many failings and incompatibilities with the state of the actually-modern "vanilla" web art, I am very pleased to see the huge strides they've made with v4. Being able to access the Tailwind theme through native CSS variables (they even have an example in the docs of a button component written in native CSS in an external stylesheet using native variables! Oh happy day!) is absolutely massive, and being able to use a CSS-only config is equally amazing. Finally, Tailwind feels more like it's a utility (ironic, since its claim to fame is utility classes!) which you can add to any project, rather than some bizarro "viral" framework that wants to eat sensible architectures and lives in its own JavaScript-y silo.

Perhaps all the criticism over the years actually had an effect. Or maybe they finally arrived at good conclusions on their own. Either way, I suspect many of the pro/anti-Tailwind arguments are no longer relevant, and that's a Very Good Thing. Now we can get down to business and ship product.

tipiirai8• 1 year ago

I suspect many of the pro/anti-Tailwind arguments are no longer relevant

I feel there are two issues with Tailwind for me as a designer / design engineer.

* First, JavaScript/Tailwind engineers have hijacked the conversation on design. Instead of "utility-first," "dead code elimination," and "type-safe CSS" I focus more on desing systems. Whether to use Perfect Fifth or Perfect Fourth in typography for example.

* Second, Tailwind makes it impossible for me to participate in the actual craft. Design decisions get buried in React components with cryptic expressions like `flex items-center shadow-lg p-6 hover:bg-gray-50 dark:bg-gray-800 py-[calc(theme(spacing[2.5])-1px)]`. This might make sense for JavaScript engineers, but blocks/makes it hard for systematic design. Instead of expressing precise mathematical relationships through CSS, we're essentially writing inline styles with better ergonomics.

skydhash• 1 year ago

Maybe Tailwind is useful for bigger projects, but I tend to prefer component based class instead. The biggest DX for CSS is using the web inspector and directly modifying the DOM, then copying the adjusted values to the text editor. For a much serious project, I go with the balsamiq -> figma route to create an actual design system.

Foreignborn• 1 year ago

Tailwind has solved a lot of problems. And this is coming from someone who doesn't use it half the time.

Some thoughts about this topic, not necessarily in disagreement:

- Designers seldom think in the way you describe (explicit computer-readable rules, systems of design). A lot of designers are coming from crafts that are more implicit. It doesn't surprise me design business logic is not the topic of conversation.

- You need to update your tailwind classes to reflect your design business logic. Don't do "bg-gray", do "on-surface-emphasis" or whatever business logic. This is just a simple config change.

- You probably brought up modular scale as just one example, but modular type has become near myopic dogma of frontend engineers who haven't had any typesetting experience. A scale of 1.25 vs 1.5 is so in the weeds as to be useless. There are so many alternative ways to set type (e.g. take lessons from CJK typesetting) or innovate typography on the web (e.g. build your own leading-trim implementation!).

d1sxeyes5• 1 year ago

No one cares what your typography ratio is if you can’t get it in front of a user quickly enough (dead code elimination), reliably enough (type safe), or cost effectively enough (i.e. if you have to pay for more developer time to implement the same work).

Tailwind is a tool for craftspeople, not artists. It democratises design by making it simpler. For folks that are really good designers, they should be happy that they can up their prices knowing that customers are paying for their expert eye, rather than just the basics again and again.

lenkite2• 1 year ago

Man their very playground at https://play.tailwindcss.com/ gives this unreadable crap (sorry for swearing) for the very first `div` on the first line:

    relative grid min-h-screen grid-cols-[1fr_2.5rem_auto_2.5rem_1fr] grid-rows-[1fr_1px_auto_1px_1fr] bg-white [--pattern-fg:var(--color-gray-950)]/5 dark:bg-gray-950 dark:[--pattern-fg:var(--color-white)]/10

How can anyone prefer this gobbledygook over a nice CSS class declaration with line-separated standard CSS properties ? How can one even maintain this ?

Maybe the modern generation of web developers have IQ 200 and 20/20 vision with eidetic memory and I should just put myself to pasture.

4m1rk2• 1 year ago

I just want the color palette of the Tailwind CSS.

arielcostas• 1 year ago

Their palette is really neat. I always check it out when I need colour inspiration, especially for "cold greys" and other "state" colours (green for success, red for error, yellow for warning...).

agos5• 1 year ago

yeah, the palette is neat. My main gripe with Tailwind is that it blends a set of design tokens (which I like) with a technology to apply them (which I don't like)

jgalt212• 1 year ago

Yes, someone should make a tailwind inspired bootstrap theme.

Spone• 1 year ago

Radix Colors ?

sibeliuss• 1 year ago

I'm still a critic in terms of actually using it, but what I find amazing about tailwind is how amenable it is to AI-generated workflows. It seriously works _so good_. Anything can be expressed, and systematically. There's something amazingly useful there.

esperent• 1 year ago

what I find amazing about tailwind is how amenable it is to AI-generated workflows

It's highly amenable to human workflows as well. Of course, humans are more disparate than AIs so it doesn't suit all humans - no tool can. But it sure does seem like a majority of humans web developers like it.

ebiester• 1 year ago

So, I wonder how AI is going to work with the new upgrade. Are teams going to delay upgrading until there is proper Claude support, for example?

bythreads3• 1 year ago

Its horrible, annoying and gets in the way

andrewmcwatters• 1 year ago

Tailwind is mind-boggling to me. Like something that would be written by someone who doesn’t actually write a lot of HTML or CSS.

Bootstrap is bad enough, where you end up using 4, 5, 6 classes for display, margin, padding alterations to existing components.

It’s just unreadable crap. No wonder it’s popular though. Most people suck at designing. The ones that don’t aren’t using Tailwind.

intrasight• 1 year ago

The ones that don’t aren’t using Tailwind.

True. And they're not using HTML or CSS either.

robertwt7• 1 year ago

so much love for tailwind! I've used it since version 1 and have been always my default for starting new projects.

Congrats to tailwind team!

bitbasher2• 1 year ago

Last time I tried v4 the automatic content detection was pretty bad. It would falsely detect tailwind classes if it seen a similar name in a string in a code file. It seemed pretty dumb.

dcre2• 1 year ago

That is more or less how it worked in v3 already, because any string could be used as a CSS class.

"The way Tailwind scans your source code for classes is intentionally very simple — we don’t actually parse or execute any of your code in the language it’s written in, we just use regular expressions to extract every string that could possibly be a class name."

https://v3.tailwindcss.com/docs/content-configuration#class-...

The only difference in v4 is that scanning is so fast, they just scan roughly everything by default. You can still opt into manually specifying which files to scan.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-fil...

silverwind2• 1 year ago

In v3, one can use `blocklist` in the config to eliminate false-positives, but with the config file gone, this seems no longer possible, so I won't be upgrading.

In one project, roughly 75% of the detections were false-positives, unnecessarily bloating the CSS.

pier25• 1 year ago

Personally I'm not interested in using Tailwind but my main criticism is that it didn't go far enough in its approach.

Instead of using classes (which are extremely limiting) they should have created their own language like Imba did (inspired by TW).

https://imba.io/

dang• 1 year ago

Recent and related:

Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210553 - Nov 2024 (125 comments)

mythz8• 1 year ago

Was it really necessary to break all existing apps using `npx @tailwindcss`?

It's an easy enough change to `npx @tailwindcss/cli` but we now have to go back and update all Apps and templates and since it uses v4 we now have to test every App to see if anything's broken with a v4 major release.

Given its massive install base, surprised they wouldn't maintain backward compatibility with v3 and have an explicit opt-in upgrade path to v4.

Edit:

v4 did actually break all our Tailwind Apps which doesn't support `@import "tailwindcss"`, likely because we use `npx tailwindcss` without any local npm dependencies. Trying to use the existing v3 `@tailwind components` renders a useless app.css. Only solution atm is to explicitly use v3 and change all our build scripts to use `npx tailwindcss@v3`.

jitl19• 1 year ago

You’re doing something silly living without a lock file to use a tool as part of your build process. Why don’t you actually include the version of the tool you want in your dev dependencies + lock file? That way, you don’t get broken. We’ve had the solution to this problem - lock files - for 15ish years, since Ruby’s `bundle` introduced it.

mythz8• 1 year ago

Not everything is a node App. We don't have a lock file because we don't have any local npm dependencies (as already mentioned). We're using `npx tailwindcss` as-is.

aembleton3• 1 year ago

Given its massive install base, surprised they wouldn't maintain backward compatibility with v3 and have an explicit opt-in upgrade path to v4.

Given it's a major version change, I'd expect it to create breaking changes, otherwise it would be a minor version change.

tlrobinson• 1 year ago

Tailwind’s abuse of CSS classes as a DSL has always felt like a hack to me.

You shouldn’t need a special editor extension to get highlighting/autocomplete/etc, just use TypeScript and a CSS-in-TS solution.

darkhorse132• 1 year ago

just use TypeScript and a CSS-in-TS solution

THIS is the definition of a hack to me, so yeah.

dbbk5• 1 year ago

May be a hack but it just works.

rayrrr2• 1 year ago

To some extent, reading between the lines of many of these comments, I think “pure CSS” designers are feeling threatened by the quality level of Tailwind sites designed by the rest of us.

tipiirai8• 1 year ago

It's worse. React killed the craft of design engineering because everything is JavaScript. CSS develoeprs are gone.

jitl19• 1 year ago

Design engineers still exist, they just write more JS these days. They are still building UI and design systems and teaching craft & supporting full stack teams. The craft is there, but the tools are different.

bern4444• 1 year ago

My initial reaction to Tailwind was: what a pain. I already know CSS, now I have to learn CSS again...

I imagine its how parents might feel when they go to help their children with math homework only to find the math is now totally different from when they were in school and their methods (while still valid) for solving problems are no longer accepted by the school and their child is annoyed by having to reconcile the two systems...

I get the, tailwind works well in a team and scales nicely and you just have to use it, mentality. I've experienced it.

I still prefer a plain style sheets that targets elements by a class or tag (especially since CSS supports nested selectors!).

There is an issue in managing stylesheets, and for that I really like how Remix/React Router manages CSS where CSS flies are defined and applied at the route level. Where that isn't enough or dynamic styles are too complex for a .css file:

    style={{...}}

is always available.

CSS is so powerful, flexible, and extensible, tailwind feels like a limitation rather than an enhancement. I don't understand the continued appeal, but clearly many others do. I'm not sure why, but I am confident we'll all have moved on to something else in another 3 or 4 years too.

sebmellen• 1 year ago

Limitation reduces available complexity and that’s why tailwind wins. It’s a composable, standardized, and modularized wrapper around a very massive and complex system. That’s a big advancement.

jitl19• 1 year ago

I agree it’s frustrating initially to re-learn CSS… I used to make the same arguments. But after contributing to an open-source project using Tailwind I got up to speed, and now I feel differently.

Tailwind is essentially just stenography for style={{…}} - a single utility takes 15 characters that would take multiple lines in a .css file or style object. It greatly reduces the amount of time I need to spend googling stuff like “visual text replacement css” or perusing various css cheat sheets or skimming through css-tricks blog posts from 8 years ago. Instead I always go to tailwind docs, and quickly learn the utility class that just does the thing I want. A surprising amount of it fits in my brain cache, much more than trying to cache the css for all the tasks I might need to do in a layout.

Aeolun4• 1 year ago

I think it’s because now your entire component is contained in a single file. No more separately messing around with CSS. The styles are right there on the element they apply to without having to cross reference anything.

You could do this with just the css attribute, but that has the issue that everyone has always been taught it is wrong to do that, and a list of strings that contain a bunch of utility is easier than writing those plain CSS objects.

arkh• 1 year ago

You could do this with just the css attribute, but that has the issue that everyone has always been taught it is wrong to do that

But why is it wrong to use the style attribute? What makes using tailwind to do the same thing "not wrong"?

Also this https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#us... and https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#st... look like reinventing the Cascading of CSS with an awful syntax.

nedt• 1 year ago

I'm learning math with my kid and it's not different to what I learned. Can still solve everything quickly.

On the other hand there are those posts on social media mixing multiplication and division and telling you there is only one true answer to those. Tailwind isn't that bad, but it's more into this direction for me as an old fart ;)

mrits• 1 year ago

In the US you can get all the right answers on a test and still fail

kaeshiwaza• 1 year ago

Locality of behavior can be done with few lines of js. https://github.com/gnat/css-scope-inline

vim-guru2• 1 year ago

I assume that you don't even need javascript after a few releases of Firefox. All other major players support scoped styles.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope https://caniuse.com/?search=%40scope

hit8run• 1 year ago

I like tailwind but think it’s not needed anymore as CSS got better. Utility frameworks don’t necessarily need a build step.

I forked and finished Tachyons successor Tachyons 5: It has container queries built in and p3 colors.

https://github.com/gobijan/tachyons5/blob/main/tachyons5.css

If you need very sophisticated layouts write them in plain css. For quick styling utilities are awesome.

Unpopular opinion. Now downvote me to the ground.

croisillon• 1 year ago

Text of TFA is cropped on my Safari (iPhone 7), a bit ironic init?

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

Question for those developers who, like me, have no f/end build step: How would I use tailwind without a f/end build step? All the examples of using tailwind 4.0 on the linked site assume a f/end build step.

My project does not use (and I have no plans to include) npm, or PostCSS, etc.

rahkiin• 1 year ago

For a static site I have, I manually run the Tailwind tool when I include new classes. It generates style css and I commit this file to git.

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

Thanks; I actually did not know there was one until you and the sibling poster told me.

To anyone else with the same question: See https://tailwindcss.com/blog/standalone-cli

stevoski• 1 year ago

This is what keeps me from using Tailwind too. I simply do not want to add the maintenance headaches of an npm-based build process to my project.

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

I simply do not want to add the maintenance headaches of an npm-based build process to my project.

Apparently I was just too blind to find it - here is how you can (presumably) use tailwind without pulling in npm and node.js.

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/standalone-cli

GrzegorzWidla2• 1 year ago

Vite dev, preview and build scripts make it so stupidly simple that I can’t believe people don’t pull it for all, including the simplest, sites.

Plus I couldn’t imagine developing without TypeScript and hot reloads in 2025.

burgerrito• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure the point of using TailwindCSS is to use build step. There is another way, it uses Tailwind's CDN. But I think even the developer don't recommend it outside of development phase

If you don't want to use NPM, I can recommend Tailwind's standalone CLI

lelanthran4• 1 year ago

If you don't want to use NPM, I can recommend Tailwind's standalone CLI

Didn't know there was one. Will look into it.

vim-guru2• 1 year ago

CSS has become significantly more user-friendly than in the past, with most browsers now behaving consistently. It's worth learning as there is no build step involved, and it avoids cluttering your markup with excessive code.

You could opt to use style attributes directly within your HTML. Historically, we avoided this to maintain a separation of concerns, but it's puzzling why some prefer reintroducing similar methods. Is it just to save a few keystrokes? Using style attributes even seems more straightforward since it doesn't require translating code in your head.

I simply don't see the appeal.

morbicer• 1 year ago

There's a bunch of things you can't do with style attributes, just to pick a few:

- Pseudo-classes (e.g., :hover, :focus)

- Pseudo-elements (e.g., ::before, ::after)

- Media queries

- Keyframes and animations

And the DX in a larger project isn't great either.

On the other hand, this upcoming standard is a great addition for collocating styles https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@scope

nilslindemann• 1 year ago

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer also solves a lot of problems.

tipiirai8• 1 year ago

It's because we've normalized React and tight coupling. Styling belongs to components, not in design systems. I feel the JavaScript-first engineering ecosystem needs brave new design-led companies, who see the power of modern CSS and systematic design.

aembleton3• 1 year ago

I simply don't see the appeal.

- Not having to name CSS classes

- Easier to read as it's inline with the rest of your HTML

- Standardised way of naming so that everywhere uses the same conventions

- Not having to manage a separate file and remove unused components

- Being able to use media queries, which I couldn't do in a style tag

- No risk of changing a class that is used elsewhere. CSS has global scoping which has its benefits but is risky.

skeletal882• 1 year ago

The problem is that with bootstrap I have card, table, etc. With tailwind I have an unreadable alpabet soup when I am not a designer but a developer and am not familiar with tailwind.

lawn• 1 year ago

Easier to read as it's inline with the rest of your HTML

I really don't think a big blob of text with a bunch of unnamed divs is easier to read.

The styles night be easier to find but they're absolutely not easier to read.

agos5• 1 year ago

no, a single html attribute containing "relative before:absolute before:top-0 before:h-px before:w-[200vw] before:bg-gray-950/5 dark:before:bg-white/10 before:-left-[100vw] after:absolute after:bottom-0 after:h-px after:w-[200vw] after:bg-gray-950/5 dark:after:bg-white/10 after:-left-[100vw]" is not "easier to read" (example taken at random from the Tailwind homepage)

65• 1 year ago

Big one: Way smaller CSS bundle size.

benjiro• 1 year ago

- Not having to name CSS classes

Most websites are maybe 20 components and localized pages. Not exactly that hard to name and keep constant. Can not think of names, just ask one of the AIs.

- Easier to read as it's inline with the rest of your HTML

Only if you do a few styles. The moment you have mobile + desktop + dark/light you start to leave lines half a mile long.

- Not having to manage a separate file and remove unused components

Counterpoint: Components/templates are still the same hell to manage.

- Being able to use media queries, which I couldn't do in a style tag

CSS ... literally the bread and butter.

- No risk of changing a class that is used elsewhere. CSS has global scoping which has its benefits but is risky.

Counterpoint: You will end up with styles that are applied to parts, then copied, forgotten to change, and then have a mix of styles that conflict with each other.

And you do not use global scoped CSS, but localized per page. All you need is local CSS + a single parent id/class and voila. Local scoped will not mess with global. Do not do stupid stuff like button { style style style }. No, make global scoped iButton, so you never run into the issue off having parental styles doing funny things to child styles.

Let me introduce our lord and savvier called Nested CSS + Named CSS tags ... Reusable, standardized, ...

Tailscale is frankly a solution for front end JS frameworks, and less for any server rendered html. Use local CSS for html pages that are really local. No need to make global CSS for price cards that you only use on one page. But if something is used over multiple pages, buttons, ... that is global. Simple, no?

Ironically, i am in the process of actually removing Tailscale everywhere because the recent 3 > 4 upgrade screwed so much up. What stayed good? My actual CSS nexted/tag components that i never.

That is one of the issues with frameworks in general, etc, things between versions can really mean a lot more work vs just having everything "basic".

I feel a lot of issue that people have with CSS are more related to not having a proper understanding about CSS, and ignoring some basics. Like do not style base tags. Use nested + custom naming tags, local css + a local id/css and you have no issue with overlap. Best of all, you gain the ability to make easier reusable components as your CSS are the components, not some JS/... whatever call you need to do to render something. It gets messy fast if your breadcrumbs is a components with items, and you need to change something later on. But if its a basic breadcrumbs{} css, adding feature is just a matter of adding naming.

Trust me, took me years to get out of this mindset (and it helped that CSS evolved a lot but most people do not even realize that CSS today != what they know/grew up with)

itzami• 1 year ago

Historically, we avoided this to maintain a separation of concerns, but it's puzzling why some prefer reintroducing similar methods. Is it just to save a few keystrokes?

In bigger projects, if we start looking at the amount of files one has to deal with, Tailwind becomes very appealing. We've went through the regular `.css` route but then you have weird names, and, potentially, duplications or even conflicts. `css modules` is an option but you've now essentially duplicating the number of files that you have for each component / page. `sass` or `less` essentially bring the problems from `css modules` and regular `.css` into one.

I don't inherently like or dislike Tailwind (although I very much started by absolutely disliking it) but you feel its value in a project with 200+ files composed of components and pages

dbbk5• 1 year ago

You're seriously advocating for inline styles in the year 2025, it does not surprise me you are confused.

jitl19• 1 year ago

These days tailwind is often paired with a component abstraction system that takes place of css classes as an abstraction system. Component abstraction achieves an even more powerful separation of semantics from styling, compare:

    <h1 class=hero>Cool page</h1>

vs:

    <Hero>Cool page</Hero>

In both cases you need to go find the “hero” abstraction, but in component world we are also abstracting over the HTML tag name in addition to whatever styling stuff.

When it comes to defining the “stylistic detail” in either case, it has been separated from the “content” which is our page source file. I am happy to pay a build step to get better separation of concerns - content from presentation.

amai2• 1 year ago

See also https://daisyui.com/

notracks• 1 year ago

I heard that Daisyui v5 is ditching Tailwind so now it's just pure CSS.

amai2• 1 year ago

The Daisy UI 5 beta release is still based on Tailwind 4

"First Install Tailwind CSS 4 beta"

https://v5.daisyui.com/docs/v5-beta/

silverwind2• 1 year ago

Did they really nuke the entire js config file? I have a number of advanced use cases that depend on it, like eliminating false-positive content matches.

thijsvandien• 1 year ago

You can still use it if you want, but most of the time it’s not needed anymore.

asimpletune2• 1 year ago

I used tailwind for my site and ended up liking it a lot, but maybe for reasons that are not often mentioned? The real value of tailwind is being able to read all the styles that affect a an element in one place. Sure the classnames can get long, but it’s still a lot faster to read that long line, than open the browser tools each time or scroll up and down one (or many) stylesheets.

Then when you come back to that code later, you can confidently edit it without worrying about causing changes to other elements.

The cascading nature of CSS is still helpful, but I find that I usually want to limit my styling to just one element. For all the rest I go back to css but I wrote very little css because I usually just want to get the whitespace right.

topicseed• 1 year ago

I kind of agree but the same problem exists. If you add text-xl to a div and have nested divs and spans, they'll all be inheriting text-xl so for these nested elements, you also have to look up the element's lineage to find what's causing the text-xl.

But overall it's a bit easier yes.

javier123454321• 1 year ago

That's the css cascade, not a tailwind issue.

jitl19• 1 year ago

I think that is exactly why tailwind is good and nice. Although I also like that it makes “how do I do X?” a quick doc search instead of a 30 minute research project

twelve40• 1 year ago

real value of tailwind is being able to read all the styles that affect a an element in one place

there are helpers for that in the IDE (e.g., "Show Applied Styles for Tag" in Intellij) or even in chrome dev tools that show all this in a readable way. Tailwind snippets mentioned in this HN topic look kind of scary in comparison.

asimpletune2• 1 year ago

The difference is with tailwind that information is stored as text in source control. So you can parse it with nothing but your eyes in GitHub or by looking at a diff, without relying on any extra tooling.

gr__or• 1 year ago

Tailwind is a testament to the greatness of inline styles (styling a thing without naming it), the universality of strings and also the limits of strings.

I am excited for what comes after it, until then I'll use Tailwind (reluctantly)

Fred27• 1 year ago

Tailwind suits the kind of developers who hack things together and build up technical debt and spaghetti code rather thinking about things first and designing things properly.

whstl2• 1 year ago

I don't know. In 20+ years I have seen way more abominations and spaghetti CSS using other every CSS technique.

With Tailwind at least I know what to expect, and the code in practice rarely deviates from what it's supposed to look like.

I'm all for "not building up technical debt" and "thinking about things first" but in my personal experience the anti-Tailwind crowd doesn't have much to show here in this regard. Sure: it's theoretically possible to build a perfect CSS ivory tower, I just haven't seen even a passable one in a non-trivial project, it always devolves into a mess for various reasons... often breaking the rules of the paradigms like BEM and OOCSS, often because of cutting corners here and there.

Addendum: I'm all for criticising techniques, but it's interesting that the anti-Tailwind crowd always resorts to attacking the character of the developers that use it.

christophilus• 1 year ago

Same. Been doing this for 20+ years. I’ve worked at companies whose names are recognized and respected. My current Tailwind project is by far the most maintainable one I’ve worked on when it comes to CSS.

ozim• 1 year ago

I feel like it is the same with ORMs argument is always "they don't know proper SQL so they use ORM instead".

Which usually from people I know is they do know SQL and ORM and "no ORM crowd" doesn't have much to show.

Exactly the same with Tailwind, I see coworkers doing Tailwind and knowing CSS well and not being "pure vegan CSS developers".

But on the other hand we don't hire people who would utter such things like "no ORM" or "no framework" because those were also as in experience people who would create technical debt for others to deal with.

robjn• 1 year ago

Hard disagree. Vanilla BEM + CSS produces a parallel component system that I find very unwelcome since React (or Vue/Svelte/etc.) already accomplishes this.

Tailwind removes this burden and helps you focus on writing actual React components when needed.

KronisLV• 1 year ago

I'm not the biggest fan of Tailwind or anything, but good job on the release! Fewer dependencies and better performance are always welcome!

ptsd_dalmatian• 1 year ago

Tailwind and Sveltekit are the reason why I still love doing FE after all these years. Initially I was so sceptical of TW. I simply can't work without it now. Huge thank you to authors for their hard work.

xutopia• 1 year ago

Anyone who has ever had to deal with CSS over time knows that the biggest issue is having leftover classes. Utility first approach means this never happens.

sureglymop2• 1 year ago

I think the reason why tailwind is as popular as it is, is because it really ties in with the "change something, save, then immediately see the result" loop and dx of modern day web development.

Yes, this works with regular css too but it's the fact that you can do bigger changes inline quickly without making up a class (and god forbid you already have a different class affecting the same element and it gets hairy). Personally I think this is nice, it's great to immediately see results and then adjust. But dx is not the only thing that matters and there are tradeoffs too. Personally I would use tailwind for personal projects but I don't think I would try to introduce it at work.

bythreads3• 1 year ago

And thereby you kill all inheritance, that is the while point of css.

I find it more magic to change a single class at root and have the entire design reflow (on purpose) -

Its beautifull when combined with shadowdom and wc

sureglymop2• 1 year ago

I think that's a good point that I've even struggled with in practice.

What I would really want is to be able to write tailwind css classes but then have it automatically turned into regular css that makes sense on save. I really don't like coming up with class names and such.

MortyWaves• 1 year ago

This changes the colour palette again. They do this almost every major release. Starting to become a liability: upgrading will change your colours.

intellix• 1 year ago

Tailwind is CSS that cleans itself up as you go

0xblinq2• 1 year ago

There's a clear pattern in every "Tailwind or not tailwind" conversation (which happens everytime Tailwind is mentioned).

There's those that never used it for more than 30 minutes, that just tried it out or just skimmed through the docs. Those are the people that hate it and prefer "vanilla CSS" or similar.

Then there's the people that actually used it for a real project, within a team with more than 1 single person. Those are the people that understand its value, accept its trade offs and love it.

I've seen a lot of people jump from the first group to the second group. I've seen almost none jump from the second to the first.

That's why Tailwind is so successful.

It might not be beautiful in the eye of the purist, but it's absolutely fantastic in the eye of the builder and pragmatic.

Francute• 1 year ago

I think I don't fit in either of your groups.

I’m not against Tailwind, but I didn't used it yet because I struggle to see why it's a better approach compared to other options like Web Components or React Styled Components.

The biggest issue I have with Tailwind is how it clutters the HTML with a ton of utility classes making the HTML harder to read and maintain. Of course I see Tailwind being better than using large global CSS files with the classic CSS approach of naming html tags. But we do have ways where the CSS is scoped to a component without polluting the global namespace. Like Web Components and Styled Components. Both keep styles tied directly to the component (or more general, a specific group of html tags), making it easy to see which styles apply where.

And yes, with them there’s no need for global class names, without having to worry about unwanted side effects or clashes. If I remove a component, I also remove its associated styles without worrying about unused CSS being left behind since both are tied together. Plus, there’s no risk of one component's styles unintentionally affecting another (thanks to shadow DOMs).

I really value keeping HTML very short and readable by not mixing presentational styles directly in the markup. Tailwind’s approach, where the styling is all in the class attributes, makes the HTML feel cluttered, especially when you have long class lists on a single line, and GOD forbid you have actual class names to use there. It’s harder to understand what styles are applied at a glance since you cant even have it well indented, and it clearly reminds many reasons why we moved away from the inline style attribute in HTML in the first place. (Yes, we didn't left it for its limitations like pseudo classes and @media queries, they didn't even exist, we didn't add those new features because no one wanted to get back to those inline styling)

So, while I don’t hate Tailwind, I just don’t see the clear advantages over Web Components or Styled Components in terms of readability, maintainability, and separation of concerns, while I do have important unanswered important concerns about using it...

Yes, I've read the docs but never tried it out, I don't hate it, but I can't understand why I would choose it over other options. The fact of having a million classes in the middle of plain HTML makes them both unreadable for me.

And No, I don't like huge CSS files either, or the classic approach of using them. But it is hard for me to see why tailwind is a better approach than working with Web Components, or React with Styled components.

These two approaches allows me to not have to read presentational things in the middle of my html, and allow my html to be more clear and readable. I don't have to use CSS class names, it's easy to identify which CSS applies where, so, if you remove the component, you remove the CSS too, you don't end serving unused CSS rules. Each can have CSS not leaking to the global scope, and there is no risk on changing styles of another element...

So, there is no hate for me, but it is very hard for me to see the benefits of tailwind over these two approaches, and I really dislike the idea of having to read html elements with huge styling rules cluttering my html files, and worse, having all of them in a single line makin it hard to understand all the applied styling.

We left using style tag from HTML mostly for that reason, and not because of its current limitations (like not being able to use pseudo classes, media, etc)

0xblinq2• 1 year ago

I’m not against Tailwind, but I didn't used it yet because I struggle to see why it's a better approach compared to other options like Web Components or React Styled Components.
The biggest issue I have with Tailwind is how it clutters the HTML

You're 100% clearly in the first group. Maybe I shouldn't have said "hate" in that group, just people that don't like it or see its benefits.

Like Web Components

That's a nice solution, but in practice as of today and relatively speaking: nobody is using them.

and Styled Components

Except the performance is a lot worse. And you still have to come up with names for every single div that needs a minimal one line style.

And both of these solutions end up with huge CSS files. Huge CSS files are worse than having larger HTML markup, because CSS is a blocking resource and HTML is not.

I really value keeping HTML very short and readable by not mixing presentational styles directly in the markup

People used to say this about React, they preferred their HTML separate from their JavaScript, all nice and clean. I'm now 150% sure you're in the first group.

Yes, I've read the docs but never tried it out, I don't hate it, but I can't understand why I would choose it over other options. The fact of having a million classes in the middle of plain HTML makes them both unreadable for me.

Alright, now you've recognized it.

These two approaches allows me to not have to read presentational things in the middle of my html, and allow my html to be more clear and readable.

That's a non issue. There are extensions that will just hide classnames. You're just blending your mind looking for reasosn to justify your "I don't like it".

I promise the day you use it in a real life project where you're working with > 3 other people you will understand it's benefits, and how having "large class lists" is a non-issue and a totally acceptable trade off over the practical benefits it provides. Both on performance of the resulting CSS and maintainability over a large period of time. And think in the insane amount of discussions you'll avoid regarding if we're calling this div "styledDivWrapper" or "WraperContent" or "CardWrapper" or ".card__item--dark". Not an issue if you work alone, but when working with others this becomes a real annoyance that tailwind completely removes.

Tailwind is not for your, don't use it.

Tailwind is not for purists and architecture philosophers.

Tailwind is for pragmatic people, working on real life projects within teams where they have to ship and spend less time philosophizing on the purity and beauty of things.

Parfait__• 1 year ago

I'll stick with 3, not rewriting so much of the codebase because taking away features is now an improvement. Not sure where dogma and performance overlap but it isn't in making @apply a hassle.

Tailwind CSS v4.0

Related Stories