[city41]

Tailwind out of the box is a simple, canned design system. The Tailwind authors have already decided your color palette, spacings, animations, etc. This is perfectly fine for prototypes or anything that isn't that important. But if you want to have more ownership over the design system, it's better to use Tailwind's config and set it up as it makes sense for your site. Colors are the most obvious candidates, with Tailwind you can setup your own colors and from there do `bg-active` or whatever else makes sense for your site. You can define whatever is important for your site, and fall back to the inbuilt system for the things that aren't.

[nailer]

That’s definitely true. I just wish tailwind encouraged consistent styling (by having a design guide and variables) rather than styling individual elements in their documentation, which means someone has to clean up the mess later.

[cageface]

In practice I find UI built with Tailwind to be a lot more consistent because all the dimensions are built from standard values instead of custom dimensions for every css class. The bigger problem in my experience is that most designers are too lazy to set up a type and color scheme up front and just drag whatever looks good to them in their sketch/figma files.

[nailer]

You mention the issue being solved is having standard dimensions.

We’ve been doing this in CSS for quite some time using variables. This didn’t require adding a fairly leaky and thin abstraction on top of CSS and adding thousands of copy pasted singleton styles to our projects.

[cageface]

I have a few hundred tailwind classes left in my projects after a purge css pass. If you have thousands you probably should start looking into extracting some components. If you literally have "a few thousand" colors in your UI you need to find a new designer.

And CSS variables are great but way more verbose and still require you to come up with "semantic" names for everything.

[nailer]

> If you have thousands you probably should start looking into extracting some components.

This is confusing component reuse with design system reuse.

Two components may have completely different purposes, but they both have a certain rounding, palette, and other styles.

[cageface]

@apply is your friend here.