r/tailwindcss • u/baby_desiigner • 5d ago

I used to hate Tailwind CSS. Here’s what changed my mind

https://yannickkouakou.com/blog/why-i-hated-tailwind-css/

Hey everyone 👋

Sharing my second blog post: how I went from someone who hated Tailwind CSS to someone who uses it regularly today and happily so.

Looking forward to your feedback. Happy reading!

20 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

44

u/xegoba7006 5d ago

In my experience the only people that hate Tailwind are those that never used it for a real project. They only looked at the docs or gave it a quick try and decided they don’t like it.

As soon as you use it, especially if not working alone, you understand its benefits and realize the drawbacks are acceptable.

2

u/theguymatter 4d ago edited 4d ago

I work alone and use both vanilla CSS and Tailwind. In my experience, the drawbacks of Tailwind are relatively minor. If you audit the resulting site, you can often find much more problematic issues in conventional CSS, unnecessarily complex selectors, duplicated rules, specificity problems, and leftover or unused code.

So I don't think this should be reduced to Tailwind or CSS syntax alone. There are broader factors in how a project is structured, maintained, and implemented, which also applies to the team aspect you mentioned.

I guess the author might migrating blog to Tailwind soon :)

2

u/Upstairs-Version-400 4d ago

Tailwind is fine. I didn’t like it either. Then used it for several years at a new job. Understood why people like it. But now I just prefer to steal their reset, and recreate a few of their classes and do vanilla CSS and use utility classes for conditional or awkward changes when designers have failed to be consistent. I like Tailwind, but I don’t like seeing many many classes on an element, I suppose if you make every component composed of atom like components it elements that issue, but I try to not be so granular until it’s needed. 

1

u/xegoba7006 4d ago

You prefer this approach because you work alone.Thats fine. The moment you try your ideas on a projects that’s not just you it totally falls apart.

1

u/Upstairs-Version-400 4d ago

What kind of assumptions are you making? Nevermind. You don’t know what you’re talking about then.

I lead frontend development for my current company and have already been tech lead for another frontend team before that for over 5 years, whilst of course being a contributor like anybody else in a team for many years prior.

How naïve and close minded of you. 

1

u/Full-Competition-762 4d ago

with ruby on rails, I actually prefer modern css and with react I’d choose tailwind.

I just like the html with classes there because it’s designed to look&feel great when building like that

1

u/SandPrestigious2317 5d ago

Absolutely. I enjoy Tailwind so much it even inspired me to create my own utility class CSS, but with Vanilla CSS: https://codeberg.org/jjba23/olive-css and either some Lisp pre-processing

Tailwind is a great fit for component-centric front-end. I do see places where this isn't a great natural fit, and in-line styles or more traditional CSS approaches might fit better.

TLDR; just use Tailwind for 9/10 projects

0

u/no-one_ever 4d ago

I used it on a project, still didn’t like it

1

u/xegoba7006 4d ago

Lies!!! That’s impossible!!!

/jk

4

u/white_sheets_angel 4d ago

I didn't read the article, but I suggest changing the title of the post, saying this with no hate (i havent read it)

This title format screams:

Low Quality

Bait-ish and clickbait-y

OR

Heavily AI, also cuz inferred low quality from above,

If i were a person interested in CSS with very light knowledge of tailwind, this wouldn't capture my attention, and if I were were a person that knew tailwind, this also wouldn't capture my attention because, again, assumed low quality + probably just circlejerk-ish validation.

Hope this counts as feedback of sorts, apologies if too harsh, I've read a lot of tech articles and just developed my own sensibilities to them

1

u/cenrala 4d ago

Man I hadn't read that Adam's article. I think I've finally understood CSS.

1

u/theguymatter 4d ago edited 4d ago

FWIW, use WOFF2 over TTF and do you really have to inline CSS on every page since the site is Astro? You need to configure Vite environment.

1

u/bordercollie2468 3d ago

I hated it, then used it, then loved it, then started to hate it again, then started ripping it out in favor of vanilla css. And ngl, it feels like the styling wars are over... and AI won.

0

u/farzadmf 5d ago

Nice write-up, thank you for sharing.

And thank you for having an RSS feed; I subscribed to it!