[hombre_fatal]

Since Tailwind looks obviously bad on first pass with all the class spam, I'm more curious to see someone steelman Tailwind.

I have some ideas, like how the dead code elimination + granular but consistent classes lets you build novel components that are still consistent with your UI which might be essential for making a 3rd party component library work.

I've been using Bootstrap since it came out 15 years ago but it never developed a 3rd party component library. I assume because it doesn't have the same sort granular building blocks for building novel components.

Then again there are also component libraries like https://ui.mantine.dev/ that don't use Tailwind.

I sadly never really looked into these modern options since when I want to build something, the last thing I want to do is dick around with a whole new UI solution vs Bootstrap muscle memory.

[omnimus]

I think the tricky part is that Tailwind (and other functional css frameworks) are loved by 1. complete noobs who dont know css and 2. absolute killer css devs in agencies making content sites.

Most devs on this website work on aplications in big teams maintaining projects for years where css is component scoped and there is time and there are quality checks.

Now when you work in agency you come to a extremely visualy complex product website or magazine. You haven’t seen the codebase for a year (or never) and you need to change little thing and add new section to homepage… all without breaking any other part of the website. And while you have 5 hours budget.

In that context Tailwind is best middleground. It establishes system to follow and it is selfdocumenting. Everyone who can read tailwind instantly knows whats going on. And it is much better than inline styles because you can make it responsive and not get to specificity hell.

People here bash funtional css thinking that those who like it don’t understand css. I’ve worked both in agencies and on products and sorry writing css for a CRUD app forms is piece of cake compared to css for beautiful product site where every part is unique and you are required to have deep understanding of how browsers render so you can exploit that inverted position sticky so some ui cards align just right in performant way.

What i am saying is there are many kinds of websites and people who like Tailwind might just be in very different situation and sometimes they might even know way more css than those who hate it.

[moritzwarhier]

I think the best argument for Tailwind still is the blog post that the creator wrote to promote the idea (it was before the first alpha release iirc):

https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...

Everything is a tradeoff. I don't miss Tailwind in my day job, but I would certainly if I had to work on the type of project where I last successfully used it.

[vehemenz]

> Since Tailwind looks obviously bad on first pass with all the class spam

Why is "class spam" bad? Argument? Go read the CSS spec. There's nothing telling how developers/designers how they should abstract their classes.

High abstraction classes are, I'm convinced, a holdover of the early days of the web when everyone thought XML and XSLT was going to take over the world.

The great thing about functional CSS (especially Tailwind) is that I can see exactly which styles are being applied, immediately, anywhere I want in the DOM. I don't have to consult a separate stylesheet or refresh my browser. There's no context-switching and everything gets built 3-4x as fast.

[timr]

> I've been using Bootstrap since it came out 15 years ago but it never developed a 3rd party component library. I assume because it doesn't have the same sort granular building blocks for building novel components.

Except, it does now. Presumably because of the popularity of Tailwind, Bootstrap has all of these inline utility classes, and LLMs absolutely love to spam them across your code. It’s really annoying when you have a stylesheet with a few dozen well-scoped lines, and the LLM just starts bashing inline styles everywhere.

[hombre_fatal]

True, though Bootstrap's utility classes are extremely limited compared to Tailwind's classes. And they aren't very foundational. More like a fast way to bolt on tweaks.