[stephenr]

> bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg

What fresh fucking hell is this? I can't say I've had the (mis)fortune of being forced to work with Tailwind (I've seen the name enough to know it's something vaguely "CSS framework"-adjacent though).

Seriously, though what kind of crack induced nightmare state was required for someone to think up such an abomination, implement it, and then make it public for the world to see?

Furthermore, who in their right mind saw that and said "yep this is fine"?

[pyeri]

Not a tailwind geek myself but I think how they justify is "better to have a little extra spaghetti in your html code than create a truck load of spaghetti in your app.css stylesheet."

The alternative to using tailwind here is to define the specific style elements for each one in the css stylesheets yourself with something like this:

.bg-sky-500 { background-color: blue; }

Tailwind proponents argue that they avoid this "stylesheet hell" by picking ready pre-defined tailwind classes like bg-sky-500, etc. Plus they also argue that this workflow will increase productivity by standardizing "style mindsets" of your dev team who all will think "blue" means "sky-500" (for example).

Maybe it has use cases in deep or professional design work but for most backend or full-stack devs, bootstrap is definitely better than meddling with this structure.

[d1sxeyes]

Once you learn how to read it, it's actually pretty clear.

This element has a small amount of x and y padding that is suitable for (for example) keeping text away from the edge of the container. The text is white. The corners of this are rounded.

The background is the default intensity 'sky' colour, which darkens slightly on hover and darkens further when it's active.

You can take this from 77 characters to 189 like this:

    .button {
      background-color: #0ea5e9;
      color: white;
      padding: 0.5rem 1rem;
      border-radius: 0.5rem;
    }

    .button:hover {
      background-color: #0284c7;
    }

    .button:active {
      background-color: #0369a1;
    }

Tailwind simplifies consistency, and frankly is pretty readable. It's not like <button type="button" class="button">Button</button> is exactly the pinnacle of human clarity and simplicity in the first place.

Of course there are other ways to do it, but this faux outrage demonstrates not that this is some 'fresh fucking hell' or some 'crack induced nightmare', but rather that you simply don't get it.

[stephenr]

I didn't say I can't read it. I asked who thought it was a good fucking idea. I guess you've answered that implicitly.

Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work.

I can now see exactly why OP made this post. If a client told me they don't want to use something akin to bootstrap or any other sane css library, and that instead I will need to ensure that every element has every manner of css states expressed as a faux class, I wouldn't even stop to make a coffee before telling them how far they can jump.

This sounds perfect for front end “developers" who struggle even with css, and want any reason possible to pad out their billable/working hours doing nothing productive.

Oh what's that, you want to change the style of standard button everywhere in the codebase?

No of course we can't just update a single css file you silly goose.

I feel like half the bad problems in web development are because JavaScript developers saw that j2ee guys had ant and whatnot, and said "hey what if we started inventing reasons to have a build step"?

> button class="button"

The thing is, that is more readable for a sane code base. If I can glance and know it's using the correct standard button class, it means I don't need to memorise the fucking pixel sizes and states of button paddings.

I get it alright. It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist, and instead found a crowd of "developers" looking for anything shiny to pad their resume and keep themselves looking busy.

[anon373839]

> Embedding every style directly into the style attribute is also readable, and as a side benefit it doesn't need a build step just to make your styles actually work.

Critical difference: media queries are unavailable to inline styles, making impossible to implement responsive designs this way. And anyway, CSS is so much more verbose than Tailwind that it really wouldn’t be very readable outside of toy examples.

Personally, I have used CSS since it was first created. I also have used Bootstrap and Foundation, but found them brittle and cumbersome. Now I just write 95% of styles with Tailwind.

[stephenr]

> Critical difference

Yeah that's the critical difference, absolutely.

> Now I just write 95% of styles with Tailwind.

Which everyone says is only really useful if you use in a JSX Component...

So you're writing it in XML...

But then that gets converted into JavaScript....

Which then writes out some HTML and CSS?

I will absolutely not be surprised when someone declares that the XML part of JSX is too verbose and creates a library to generate the JSX code. Fuck it who am I kidding, it probably already exists doesn't it?

[andrei_says_]

100% with you on this, know you’re not the only one bewildered by the insanity of ignoring the cascade, styling everything from scratch, and placing it all in a list of classes.

[d1sxeyes]

Clearly you’ve made your mind up so I won’t push harder, except one point:

> Oh what's that, you want to change the style of standard button everywhere in the codebase?

Tailwind excels when you are using component based frameworks. This change should be at least as simple as updating main.css, except it’s in Button.tsx

[stephenr]

Why am I not surprised this rube Goldberg style machine seems like a rational thing to people who write xml to generate JavaScript to generate html.

[anon373839]

I think these debates ultimately come down to what you’re making with these tools: is it documents or application interfaces? If it’s documents, then plain HTML, CSS and a touch of JS sprinkles on top works very well, as they were designed for this. If you’re making software, though, at some point you’re going to need some additional tooling to make it feasible.

[stephenr]

> at some point you’re going to need some additional tooling to make it feasible.

I mean sure, most people will pick some kind of abstraction over parsing and constructing raw HTTP messages.

But it boggles the mind that apparently a large chunk of "developers" cannot see the insanity in writing XML to generate JavaScript which generates HTML and CSS because they want to write `<Button variant="primary">Save</Button>` rather than... `<button class="primary">Save</button>`.

Like I said earlier: so much of the folly in the NodeJS community looks like bizarre adoration of early-2000s J2EE stack.

You have a language that requires no AOT.. ah better invent increasingly convoluted and ever-changing build processes for it.

You're writing output that's essentially just a string to be sent over the wire... ah better create a wrapper for the wrapper that creates the service which renders the string.

But sure. That is totally a rational approach to development, and the nodejs community has never shown itself to be prone to chasing shiny useless things or cargo culting. I must just be overreacting.

[fastasucan]

Why would you want all that into the html, instrad of defining it in css?

[d1sxeyes]

Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place?

Preference I guess. I’m not bashing anyone who prefers writing CSS that way. But there are a lot of people who think it’s very important to share that they don’t like how Tailwind looks.

It’s an argument that’s been pretty roundly responded to here: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes

[stephenr]

> Why would you want to have to maintain a separate file instead of keeping it all in the same place?

The year 2001 called and is demanding royalties for copyright infringement on "How to write your first dynamic page in PHP - just one file needed".

[d1sxeyes]

They also want their “year X called” joke back.