[adhoc_slime]

I'm a tailwind fiend, ie I like tailwind, but I can say it won't save bytes in the source if you use it the way that the docs intend. Tailwind is not very DRY so you'll probably end up repeating classes in source resulting in extra bytes if you just used a custom class repeated on similar components.

[solumunus]

But you can create custom classes using @apply. If you're doing that alongside using it in components then it's incredibly DRY and far more efficient than anything else I've ever used in the last 20 years.

[candiddevmike]

What's the difference between custom tailwind classes and... regular CSS?

[verisimilidude]

Not much.

Tailwind's @apply just lets you apply Tailwind design tokens to CSS classes. It's useful for keeping designs looking consistent if you're already heavily invested in Tailwind. This is probably not much of an advantage unless you're working at a very large organization with many teams and web properties. And there are other CSS-native ways of enforcing design token consistency without Tailwind too. Open Props is a good example (https://open-props.style/).

@apply is also a great lazy way to just slap a string of Tailwind classes from mark-up into a class. It doesn't sound proper but it works in the context of iterative development.

[gedy]

Or Bootstrap, etc. This is why we didn't end up using TW for a large production app. It's really cool, but realized we were just ending up re-creating something like Bootstrap components using TW @apply.

[solumunus]

Once familiar, it's far quicker to read, write and reason about than raw CSS, in my experience.

[adhoc_slime]

Absolutely, I love @apply for this reason. But just look at tailwind's website, they don't exactly present this front and center, so I read their site as though they don't exactly prescribe the usage of @apply like you or I would.

but tangentially to this, that's why I like tailwind, its really not all that prescriptive but a tool that speeds up my development un-equivocally more than Sass ever has.

[corobo]

Isn't this negated by everything being zipped up in transit?

The more you repeat yourself the better it compresses

[adhoc_slime]

Right but that isn't actually the source, which was the point that the parent commenter was making.