[wwweston]

> it is important to make the distinction between inlining the implementation of some behaviour and inlining the invocation (or declaration) of some behaviour

tailwind’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make this distinction well.

In a sense this is a strength because it probably matches the amount of effort most devs/orgs who don’t focus here are willing to put in to the problem; this worse-is-better solution is functional enough especially in settings where component separation has already been adopted. Along with some decent baseline design tokens, it’s enough for people who don’t want to care more, especially if they don’t ever particularly see the consequences of hyperlocalizing implementation.

If your project has someone whose job it is to think through design systems and how they’re expressed via CSS, you can do better. If you don’t, you can do worse.

And personally, I’ve seen a LOT of discussion about separating SQL and app code. There’s a similar tension. Wrapping queries in function calls often means fewer duplicated queries (often painfully verbose) and opportunities for dumb security mistakes, but reduces the expressive variation the raw query language provides, and many systems and devs behind them end up pursuing balance between the two… or outsourcing the decision to an ORM or other data access layer whose tradeoffs also probably have shortcomings but at least they get to worse-is-better stop thinking about it except at particular pain points.