[nailer]

> The reality is that if the codebase and style code is in flux, that idealized CSS stylesheet will churn towards a being a mess of tech debt.

Interesting. That’s not been my experience. People tend to clean up as they go, eg if the design says we now need a thinner padding / gaps or a different colour blue, we change the variable, and if we spot cut and pastes we fix them.

It’s certainly much easier to refactor than visual classes mixed into HTML.

[_v7gu]

But tailwind also provides a way to change variables?

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/customizing-spacing

Better yet, it also forces people to use theme spacing sizes or making the use of custom unit very explicit (a [] in your class name)

[nailer]

Tailwind doesn’t force people to do anything more than using regular CSS does. Or any technology - it’s really difficult to change human behaviour with technology.

[Kiro]

What you describe is not representative of how CSS is maintained in most companies. You always end up in a situation where it's impossible to track down what styles affect what elements so you start overriding and duplicating because you're afraid to touch existing CSS.

[nicoburns]

How can it ever be impossible to track down styles? The browser dev tools will tel you exactly which styles apply to which element.

[kaba0]

Come on, do you honestly gonna tell people that just because a Turing-machine somehow managed to untangle that mess, it is humanly parsable? Most sites are not HN with like 3 lines of CSS, dev tools will list you like 10s of different rulesets that together determine the output — of course one can see what’s the end result, but now try changing some property that gets applied by multiple rules. That can get very difficult/impossible since you may not have control over every stylesheet.

[Kiro]

Nothing is impossible but it becomes hard because the element is styled through multiple cascades, and you need to track it down both ways. When changing a class or a style you need to know what elements that change affects, which will be hard to track down because of the same reasons.

[nailer]

Svelte, which is fairly mainstream these days looking at state of js, scopes your styles to the component.

So global styles are very rare and usually a bunch of branding variables these days.

Like a lot of bad solutions in tech, tailwind seems to exist as a workaround to the core issue of ‘still using react’.

[satvikpendem]

Similar to Vue then, looks like. For me, CSS modules or CSS-in-TS solves our scoping problems in React.

[nailer]

Yes exactly. If react included scoped styles out of the box conflicts would be rare and tailwind would be far less popular.

[antihero]

Not really, you have intellectually missed some of the key reasons for Tailwind and why it's popular.