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.
@hejsna um, OK. I'm not sure how anyone who actually likes CSS can appreciate Tailwind. It really does seem to be the framework for people who hate vanilla CSS. (And obviously, I would strongly disagree with their reasoning.)
See also: https://www.spicyweb.dev/tailwind-is-a-cult/ 😅
@jaredwhite I like CSS, I’m good at it, and I still enjoy the heck out of Tailwind! Vanilla CSS will inevitably devolve into an append-only hairball unless you apply Taliban-level control over who can do what with your CSS. The alternative is stuff like CSS-in-JS which, you know, ick, or scoped styles which is fine I guess but tends to discourage reuse.
@hejsna > Vanilla CSS will inevitably devolve into an append-only hairball
Well it doesn't on any project I run. 😏
Why does "best practices don't actually work" win when it comes to CSS but not any other programming language? You could write a 2000-line Ruby program with nothing but tiny prodecural functions, but, like, why?
Now that CSS has native variables, we can build an entire design system via tokens and set of components, and use very few global "spooky action at a distance" rule sets.
For JS component heavy applications, CSS-in-JS is the best choice by far. Much more intuitive, maintainable, and effective. If your component CSS is a part of what defines the component, it should go with the component, and have an effect only on it.
If your application has so widely used and standardized styles that you can share a lot of them, CSS files are cool.
But nowadays I find myself less and less in the second escenario. And for shared features, CSS variables are being revolutionary, especially for dark/light theming, custom font sizes, etc. They are making CSS files more and more a big list of variable values, to be used by components.
@jgg @jaredwhite okay but Tailwind does make styles live with the component, and those atomic classes won’t affect anything else, so what’s the problem with it? That’s one of its big advantages, along with NEVER HAVING TO NAME INANE STUFF like “card-header__subheader” anymore, that has had a huge effect on my mental well-being