| I'm not a frontend developer so I've been watching this from the outside over the years of reading HN. The impression I got is that Tailwind is essentially CSS 2.0 with warts ironed out (sorry for the unpleasant mixed metaphor): A) CSS / Tailwind: lots of little 'atomic' classes describing individual visual properties. Easy to understand, easy to customize, but slow to read, slow to get started, with plenty of stuff to learn B) CSS frameworks / Tailwind components: fewer classes declaratively describing the component's role (eg 'btn-primary'). Quick to get started, elegant to read, but prone to abstraction leakage and trickier to bend to your own exact specifications There's always been a need for both kind of tools for different projects, in the same way that e.g. network programming may involve anything from bit-banging commands to high-level protocols. Over the years CSS frameworks kept improving, but CSS was much slower to do so - although it acquired flexbox, grid, etc., the language limitations stayed, and they were bad enough to spawn SASS/LESS out of a genuine need. Tailwind saw a ton of hype and adoption because all the developers who had always wanted to go the (A) road now had a well-designed set of simple classes they could use with a lot fewer footguns, plus a bunch of developers who had adopted (B) because it was the road that had all the momentum suddenly realized that they probably wanted to use (A) once it was made less painful. DaisyUI and similar projects don't do anything that Bootstrap didn't do for CSS, but by building on top of Tailwind it means that, when your project or resources grow and you want to move from (B) to fully customizing your style in (A), you will be able to write your individual little graphic touches in Tailwind instead of plain CSS. |