[hbn]

Are you talking about the CDN version of Tailwind? If so, the docs specifically say that's not for production use.

A lot of very useful features require a build step because it generates classes on the fly based off what you typed in the HTML.

[dom96]

I bet you lots of people are ignoring the "don't use this in prod" advice. Why doesn't Tailwind just offer a for-production CDN link? I understand that the build step provides features, but what if I don't care about those features?

[hbn]

It's not just features, it's a 350kb js file you have to send over the wire [1] as opposed to pre-building and sending a tiny css file containing the small subset of classes you used.

Not to mention, I don't know exactly how it works, but I assume it's doing all that processing to convert classes in your HTML into CSS classes on the client side so it's probably less performant.

[1] https://cdn.tailwindcss.com/