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danaw

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A web designer and developer from Northern California.

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Most websites don't need to be applications, and are needlessly made to be applications, often even SPAs instead of simply being mostly informational pages, in turn putting different requirements for styling onto the project.

you read a lot into me choosing "application" instead of using "website". for the record i think tailwind works great for both and it actively using in in a many tens of thousands of LOC web "application" and managing a team using it on a fortune 100 mostly static website that gets millions of views a month.

tailwind works great for both and in fact i'd argue works even better on "static" sites because it's efficient bundles and selector compression over the wire. we don't ship a single byte of css we don't use, thus saving on wasted bandwidth and increasing our SEO/page speeds

There is no need for frameworks. Well structured and scoped CSS can handle it all.

i love when people are so confident other people don't have valid reasons to use tools. real "junior dev" vibes, my friend

What if not that does CSS already offer? I don't see how normal CSS does not already do that. No additional thingamabob needed.

how many "bespoke" css projects have you worked on? i've works on MANY. nearly all of them suck to get familiar with and to not risk messing up some weird selector hierarchy you weren't aware of. can it be done well? sure, but it's incredibly rare and often only happens on smaller teams/projects. scaling out bespoke css sites becomes increasingly challenging as you scale in LoC and team size.

on the other hand, give me any tailwind project and i can start contributing immediately

Tons of ready-made stylesheets out there to use for teams. What more of an "ecosystem" do I need to style a web page? Why do I need an ecosystem? Is it not rather a tailwind self-induced need?

ready-made stylesheets? do you mean like a css/html template?

the ecosystem means IDEs work well with it, there are lots of help resources, llms are trained on them heavily, you can find devs who know how to be productive with it, etc.

you can be very familiar with css but struggle within some bespoke framework with the fact that you can structure css in near infinite ways. tailwind gives you a consistent structure and approach across projects

what unique flaws does tailwind have that the OP pointed out? my entire reply was pointing out that fact and that tailwind (or any tool) doesn't force you to build "div soup apps", which is factually correct.

If you have some unique feature to tailwind that you think makes it better than the rest, you should share that.

i did mention some but you'll then claim it's not unique because some other tool has it so...

Everything you have listed is also accomplished by all the other CSS frameworks

not true. most frameworks for example do not have nearly the universal familiarity tailwind has, for example. tailwind has a build tool that strips unused selectors and can dynamically build new classes (eg "w-[20rem]") if needed. do all frameworks do that? maybe a few but most do not

sounds like tailwind is simply the main one you have experience with.

i've used so many frameworks i cannot count them on my hands (and feet even). i've settled on tailwind because it solves problems better than any other tool i've used. that's my preference yes, but your implication that i'm just using it because it's the only thing i know is so far from the truth it's comical

do yourself a favor and stop assuming people choosing tailwind don't know what they're doing

Sure, it's easy to overthink things but most of the time, it's not that complex. then you sir are the one that have not worked on complex projects. i'm currently the lead on a design system for a fortune 100 company with nearly 100 block level components and many other smaller elements. responsive, multi-theme/site support, animations, accessibility, robust interactivity, etc. not even a button or link is simple when you're building complex systems tailwind allows us to reason more clearly about these often very complex components

inline CSS can't be cached

this shows your lack of understanding. first off, it's not inline css, they're classes and thus you only ever define "flex" in one place vs many many places in non-utility css approaches. in fact, sorted html classes are compressible over the wire so you're doubly wrong.

because they never learned it properly condescending

it lets you use CSS while not requiring an understanding of how CSS works, beyond its most basic concepts also condescending and just such a boring, over used argument i always hear from haters of tailwind maybe try and counter my arguments without the attitude? maybe understand seasoned veterans of css might have their reasons to choose it?

you're unfairly conflating things and putting the blame for a lack of care or understanding on tailwind vs on the dev themselves. nothing about tailwind forces you to build inaccessible or "div soup" apps

can tailwind be used poorly? absolutely. but that's true of any tool

i've been writing CSS for ~20 years and am quite capable with it, having used CSS, Less, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, PostCSS etc. the reason i have settled on Tailwind for the last few years is precisely because it enables me to build more robust application styling.

tailwind frees you from having to spend excessive time building abstractions of styles/classes that will invariably change. placing the styles directly into the markup that is affected by it reduces cognitive load, prevents excessively loose selectors affecting styles unintentionally and really aids in debugging. jumping into codebases with bespoke css frameworks is always more complex and fragile than a tailwind codebase for anything but the most simple sites/apps

add to that the ability to have consistent type, color and sizing scales, reduced bundle sizes, consistency for any developer who knows tailwind and a very robust ecosystem (and thus llms are very familiar with it) and tailwind is a really excellent choice for a lot of teams

tailwind is like most tools; it can be used well or poorly depending on who is using it

it was related to a deploy issue not a PR and he's the sole developer on a small team, i just consult part time. the example is less relevant; we are seeing developer delegate their understanding to the confidence of an LLM

wish they would have just moved these people to technical support; cloudflares support is the worst i've ever experienced even under business/enterprise contracts (no replies ever in most cases)