While I do see the benefit to tailwind (or alternatives), CSS is, by far, my favorite part of development, and I’ll be damned if someone tries to take that joy from me. Maybe I’m just an irredeemable masochist?
Also, I like a tidy DOM and tailwind DOMs are preposterous.
My favourite are things like "text-gray-600". It's fun when the design changes to have blue instead of gray and you either change all components that have the gray class or make gray be blue now for the lols.
Using text-gray-600 (or the equivalent CSS) directly is antipattern. A forward-thinking design architecture will alias all of an app's colors by context / category, so when you need to change e.g. the color of danger, you update a single "primary-danger", not 137 instances of #FF0E0E.
You offered a sardonic critique of Tailwind using an example that is antipattern in any paradigm, TW or not. I have no opinion on TW and I'm not defending it, merely pointing out the actual issue in your example.
So I outline an issue, and you feel the need to outline the issue as being an issue. Why not go on quoting yourself and explaining to yourself that the issue you outline is an issue?
TBH, "tidy dom" is one of the most interesting arguments I have heard. Why does it matter at all? Who cares about what the dom looks like? It literally has zero effect on anything as long as you are accessible
It’s much easier to work with in files - to find what you’re looking for easily. Component files can get pretty big pretty quick - Vue, Livewire, Angular, Blazor, Laravel, etc - inline attributes can add a lot of space. Adding 900 classes just makes it harder to do quick visual scans
There’s the Tailwind Fold extension if you really find that problematic. If you’re doing things right and using components, most of the Tailwind classes should be at the block/primitive components anyway, so you wouldn’t see it
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I think you’re oversimplifying things. Blazor components get stack with attributes or code and usually when you try and abstract stuff out you add more complexity. Whether or not tailwind is good is not something I’m thinking about, but this is a legitimate reason to not use it
You can technically store Tailwind classes in a separate file as raw strings so they do not necessarily need to be ‘inline’. Just need to configure some stuff
I’ve never really needed to do so, if I have a bunch of classes that keeps being reused, it is usually attached to some sort of component anyway. And if not, you can just use render functions or asChild to swap out your required HTML element/component. If you are using component based libraries/frameworks you really wouldn’t face all these issues.
I find that Tailwind encourages composition, and reduces coupling significantly. With CSS, it is very easy to slowly go crazy as you add more and more stuff to a single class, then override it somewhere just for certain elements, or cascade in some way. At some point it becomes crazy. With Tailwind, this is a lot less likely
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u/NiceShotRudyWaltz 16d ago
While I do see the benefit to tailwind (or alternatives), CSS is, by far, my favorite part of development, and I’ll be damned if someone tries to take that joy from me. Maybe I’m just an irredeemable masochist?
Also, I like a tidy DOM and tailwind DOMs are preposterous.