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

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.
Popular Frontend topics










Other popular topics










Latest in Frontend
Latest (all)
Categories:
Popular Portals
- /elixir
- /rust
- /wasm
- /ruby
- /erlang
- /phoenix
- /keyboards
- /js
- /rails
- /python
- /security
- /go
- /swift
- /vim
- /clojure
- /java
- /haskell
- /emacs
- /svelte
- /onivim
- /typescript
- /crystal
- /c-plus-plus
- /tailwind
- /kotlin
- /gleam
- /react
- /flutter
- /elm
- /ocaml
- /vscode
- /opensuse
- /ash
- /centos
- /php
- /deepseek
- /scala
- /html
- /zig
- /debian
- /nixos
- /lisp
- /agda
- /textmate
- /react-native
- /sublime-text
- /kubuntu
- /arch-linux
- /revery
- /ubuntu
- /manjaro
- /spring
- /django
- /diversity
- /lua
- /nodejs
- /julia
- /slackware
- /c
- /neovim