CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Tailwind is a Leaky Abstraction

I have to admit: as I’ve watched Tailwind enthusiastically adopted by more and more of the frontend community, I’ve remained skeptical. But, having never used it, I decided to keep quiet until I had an informed opinion.

Well, I’ve spent the past few months at work learning Tailwind with an open mind. I can now confidently say that I do, in fact, dislike Tailwind, and I wouldn’t use it for any new projects.

Tailwind is commonly described as “utility classes”, but that’s a bit of an understatement. It’s essentially a small language you write in the class attributes of your HTML that compiles to a combination of CSS rules and selectors — an abstraction over CSS. But all abstractions leak, and Tailwind is very leaky.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

faust

faust

Oh, nice one, unfortunately I don’t own this book so I won’t be able to take part on it, but I’m looking forward for some future opportunity =)
It seems a great idea to keep people motivated.

faust

faust

Oh, nice!
I just love this forum more each day :blush:
I’ll PM you
Thanks!

gflashner

gflashner

Maybe it is just me, but I really didn’t enjoy working with Tailwind utility classes. I am not a CSS expert, but I still like working with plain CSS.

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

First poster: bot
JavaScript allows calling a function with a different number of arguments than the expected number of parameters, i.e., one can pass fewe...
/js
New
First poster: bot
PDF documents are a major part of our digital lives and, in an era where we spend most of our time working inside a web browser, enhancin...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
The future of web-based software architectures is already taking form, and this time it’s server-rendered (again). Papa’s got a brand new...
New
First poster: bot
Humio software engineers Thomas Anagrius and Jeroen Engels sat down to talk about why they got involved with Elm for web-based front-end ...
New
First poster: bot
VanillaJS v. jQuery v. hyperscript Below are comparisons of how to implement various common UI patterns in vanilla javascript, jQuery an...
New
First poster: bot
At NoRedInk we have one of the largest Elm apps in the world. It serves millions of teachers and students, and our frontend code is almos...
New
brainlid
In episode 59 of Thinking Elixir, we talk with Joel Kemp about his experience introducing Elixir at Spotify. We learn about the concurren...
New
First poster: bot
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, i...
New
First poster: bot
Since the Humio web client is built in Elm, I’d like to share some of our learnings with Elm over the years. Specifically, working with U...
New
StuntProgrammer
It’s rare to see a web app that doesn’t use XMLHttpRequest (or fetch, the new API with comparable capability). XMLHttpRequest (which we c...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Andy and Dave wrote this influential, classic book to help their clients create better software and rediscover the joy of coding. Almost ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Free and open source software is the default choice for the technologies that run our world, and it’s built and maintained by people like...
New
dasdom
No chair. I have a standing desk. This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
NewsBot
Node.js v22.14.0 has been released. Link: Release 2025-02-11, Version 22.14.0 'Jod' (LTS), @aduh95 · nodejs/node · GitHub
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use advanced functional programming principles, practical Domain-Driven Design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scal...
New