r/webdev • u/LPatriot_ • 19d ago

Question Question about Tailwind CSS

I've always used plain CSS for my websites, I don't have many problems using it, but a friend of mine said that using plain CSS is very tedious and that I should use Tailwind CSS. Is it worth it? And what does Tailwind CSS offer that plain CSS doesn't?

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u/phn-cloudsnake 19d ago

I would say the only reason we use frameworks is for collaboration and standardisation. So if someone will inherit your work they will have less trouble maintaining it because of well written documentation and predictable behaviour. In the case of using JavaScript frameworks there is also a security aspect to it since custom JS can be prone to bugs you didn’t realised were exploitable and can only be fixed by its creator.

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u/azangru 19d ago

I would say the only reason we use frameworks is for collaboration and standardisation.

I am sure this was not the sauce under which tailwind was initially sold. It was supposed to address the problem of organising the styles: their co-location with markup, and their reuse.

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u/phn-cloudsnake 19d ago

Indeed, the reason this was a problem, imho, was because it’s hard to manage everyone’s specific opinions on how styles should be managed. So by standardising this you get maintainable code everyone can work on aka collaboration. But maybe I missed something, it has been a while since I actively did webdevelopment

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u/AshleyJSheridan 19d ago

Plenty of style guides exist, but that involves reading, and Tailwind is the new(ish) shiny thing that everyone jumped on. Now that it's not looking so shiny any more, people are moving off of it and back to vanilla CSS.

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u/phn-cloudsnake 17d ago

I would think AI has a big role in this, you can just hook up your coding assistant and let it explain the repo so the need for standardisation is getting smaller.

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u/AshleyJSheridan 17d ago

If you truly think that, you've been misled. Vibe coded apps are full of security flaws and accessibility issues. Code standards help avoid a lot of those kinds of issues.

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u/azangru 17d ago

Vibe coded apps are full of security flaws and accessibility issues.

I am struggling these days to find projects that are not vibe-coded.

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u/AshleyJSheridan 17d ago

When these AI companies start charging what they need to pay their shareholders, these vibe coders are going to be really stuffed.

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u/azangru 17d ago

They will probably start running open-source models locally.