[montroser]

No, we don't want all of the buttons to look identical.

Some are big and some are small; some are bold and primary and some are muted and secondary; some have icons; some have shadows; some are disabled, etc, etc.

It's easy to make them identical. The challenge is to be as flexible as necessary in a mature application, while minimizing verbosity and complexity.

In my experience Tailwind hurts more than it helps here. It forces you to use your component system to abstract things which otherwise wouldn't warrant the extra level of indirection.

[Adrig]

You should look more into design systems. It's not only for Figma files but can structure your whole frontend. To extend on the example above, you can do something like :

  <Button variation="primary" size="large">Primary Button</Button>
  <Button variation="secondary" size="medium">Medium</Button>
  <Button variation="tertiary" size="small">Small</Button>

[jbergens]

If you a 100 different types of buttons I can see your problem, if it is more like 5 then you just create them first and then makes the code more DRY.

For example when using React you can create 5 button components first and the refactor your code to make the 5 buttons use/call a generic button. Or have 2 generic buttons if the combinations are hard to handle. The thing with atomic CSS like Tailwind is that it very easy to quickly create a few different buttons.

[reactor]

How would you have done it without TailWind? You'd still have to create classes for each of them in plain css anyway, except it would probably be in a different .css file. The inherent complexity pertaining to your app is not taken away, it just moved the places.

[montroser]

My point is that plain CSS is already good at this. So then you don't need to make more components with their own interface to learn.

    <button class="btn large shadow">Edit</button>

    .btn {
      ...default button styles
    }

    .btn.large {
      font-size: larger;
    }

    .btn.shadow {
      box-shadow: 0 0 8px #0004;
    }

[iovrthoughtthis]

but now to understand what a single class might do to an elements style i have to check for ever possible combination .e.g

.btn.large {} .field.large {} .fieldgroup.large {} .title.large {} .link.large {} .large {}

to find all the elements that the .field.large declaration impacts we need to enumerate all the elements that have both .field and .large in any order.

we've coupled out html and css files