CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Why I don't like Tailwind CSS

You’re at a restaurant, and there’s an odd item on the menu that you’ve never heard of before, but it piques your interest. It sounds like it might be worth a try, though you’re not sure.

When the waiter approaches your table, you inquire about the dish; he notes that while most people are initially repulsed by its appearance, they should still give it a try because the chef swears that it’s supremely delicious. So, trusting his judgment, you order the dish and wait.

When your meal arrives, it looks just as unpleasant as it did in the menu. But you’re not one to judge—you’re willing to try new things. You carve into a slice of it and take a reluctant bite. And… well, it’s really not that great.

In a nutshell, this was my experience with Tailwind CSS. It’s not the worst thing to happen to CSS, but it’s certainly not the panacea that its supporters claim it is—and, in fact, it has a lot of problems…

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

Most Liked

alanq

alanq

Interesting article, some well made points but it only confirms to me that Tailwind probably is the right approach for me.

Every single approach has a trade off, and that can be presented as a criticism. But that doesn’t mean it might still not be the best approach available. Are the alternatives, whose trade offs aren’t touched on in this article, really better for a particular use case?

Maybe it’s just me, but my HTML is a bit ugly and not very readable anyway. It doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice to have more, and initially obscure looking, html classes in it.

An example of a criticism from the article that is actually a plus for me:

you’re lying to yourself if you think this is any better than writing CSS directly, or any more maintainable than directly applying inline styles. Because instead of repeating styles in your CSS, you’re now repeating them in your HTML, through class names. In fact, you’re likely repeating yourself three, four, possibly many more times now because you can’t chain selectors.

In my workflow, NOT having to open up a CSS file at all, being able to specify the presentation directly inline inside the view template, is a huge win and avoids disrupting my train of thought. It is massively better than writing CSS directly, for me.
And I can easily use helper methods to DRY up commonly repeated sets of classes (with Ruby on Rails view helpers in my case).

Opinionated is great, but this article reads quite biased to be honest. Just a warning to anyone who reads the snippet without reading the full article and considering for themselves whether alternatives really would be better.

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

I had almost the same thoughts reading it. I was like: “wait… putting style class names inside HTML is a bad thing?” WTF? I always did it like this – I am not a frontender and I only occasionally need to write HTML+CSS (mostly for hobby projects) and to me that’s actually a good thing. As you said, less interruptions.

I’d be open to something like LESS / SASS / SCSS as well though. But IMO for most small projects any of those would be a total overkill.

malloryerik

malloryerik

I’m personally liking Tailwind. My own pain points with it (minor pain, more like aches or itches…) are around stuff like combining Tailwind’s versions of CSS Grid and Flexbox which I already don’t use frequently enough to remember without constantly checking the docs, but which require enough understanding that now I’m checking two sets of docs instead of one.

Ah, this looks nice:

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

First poster: bot
A WebAssembly Powered Augmented Reality Sudoku Solver. An Augmented Reality Sudoku solver using the WebAssembly build of OpenCV (a C++ ...
New
psantos
In this tutorial, I’ll walk you step-by-step on how to install TailwindCSS 2.0 on Ruby on Rails.
New
First poster: bot
ReScript, née BuckleScript, is a state-of-the-art compiler that used to target OCaml (and Reason), but is fast moving away from its paren...
New
First poster: bot
clickbait isn’t it? But this was Brock’s immediate reaction when we saw (and I recommend you read this first): Full Third-Party Cookie ...
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
Introduction WebAssembly is a standard of the World Wide Web consortium, which latest official release is WebAssembly Core Specification,...
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
TypeScript’s never type is very under-discussed, because it’s not nearly as ubiquitous or inescapable as other types. A TypeScript beginn...
New
karolina.curiosum
Bumblebee & Stable Diffusion & Phoenix Live View meets in one place! Learn how to create a live prompt generating Stable Diffusio...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Use WebRTC to build web applications that stream media and data in real time directly from one user to another, all in the browser. ...
New
AstonJ
Saw this on TikTok of all places! :lol: Anyone heard of them before? Lite:
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
AstonJ
If you get Can't find emacs in your PATH when trying to install Doom Emacs on your Mac you… just… need to install Emacs first! :lol: bre...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Get the comprehensive, insider information you need for Rails 8 with the new edition of this award-winning classic. Sam Ruby @rubys ...
New