I wonder how much of this is just pining for a simpler time when the pages and apps you were building were just… smaller https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
The main thrust of the article seems to be the ancient argument that C programmers have long touted: “yes there are a million buffer overruns and segfaults in C codebases but that’s because PEOPLE SUCK and if they would just GIT GUD that wouldn’t happen.”
And I’m sort of tired of the insinuation that only juniors who grew up on React and sugary energy drinks appreciate Tailwind. I’ve been doing CSS for two decades and I think Tailwind is fantastic. It beats every single hand-rolled CSS framework I’ve ever used, and I have seen A LOT of them.
Never tried Tailwind, but my experiences with Bootstrap made me appreciate CSS much more. Bootstrap makes easy things easier, and hard things harder, which is exactly the opposite of what I look for when I am choosing tools. Nowadays it makes even less sense, since IA makes easy things trivial.
@hejsna I can appreciate almost any “utility class” based CSS framework, but only for overrides and special cases.
When I want a Card, Dialog, Grid cell or Switch, I don’t want to guess what utilities are required to make one. Or risk missing a margin or hover effect. I don’t even want to remember in what order I put the attributes in the markup (cause I want that consistent too).
@naton the trick is to only make one of each, I think! You gotta pick your poison: write shared CSS and get slapped with “if I change this line I might break four similar components” or write atomic CSS and risk inconsistency. The second choice there is less catastrophic and easier to fix IMO but everyone has their own opinion.
I secretly think Tailwind’s biggest enemy is the yuck factor of long class names which is either a complete dealbreaker or a nothingburger depending on how you’re wired.
@hejsna Yeah, I get that the debate often involves BEM naming to some extent, so I can see your point there.
IMO it’s always a risk to change *anything* in CSS, not only due to uncertainties in use but also due to typos, cascade effects, browser behaviors etc. That’s why I use BackstopJS and a suite of test URLs to see what pixels were pushed where since my last edits. I catch many mistakes that way. I have not found a similar way to test 100% utility based markup this way, but I’m all ears.
@jgg oh I never got along with Bootstrap, either. But Tailwind is a different beast entirely. You’re not constrained to the samey pre-made stuff that Bootstrap comes with, you’re free to make pixel-perfect layouts with it and still send something ridiculous like 5kb of CSS down the wire. It’s really good.