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While I understand the idea behind using CSS “correctly”, I have, in my 15 years of professional experience, never ever seen even one project where the hypothetical promises of CSS were actually realized. It ALWAYS ends up with a fuckton of importants, or hunting for ages for the one class fifteen levels of abstraction up that changes your one element, coming up with more and more absurd class names, until they are literally no different from just some random name. Tailwind might seem horrible in a theoretical sense, but in an actually using it sense it’s a heaven sent. I want to change the padding on THIS ONE SINGLE ELEMENT, I change it EXACTLY RIGHT THERE where the element is defined, and i can be absolutely sure that I haven’t accidentally cascaded someone else’s work to death.
#CSS, in practice, is the insane idea of every single element on your website sharing global, mutable state, and thinking that’s in anyway smart.
I have to disagree with this paragraph. That Tailwind enforces a design system is its biggest strength. Having a small selection of colors, font sizes, and padding to choose from is what makes a website feel much more cohesive than one where developers pick arbitrary values every time they style an element.
But you don’t need Tailwind for that; design systems are easy to implement these days using CSS custom properties.
I think the author is rage baiting or doesn’t appreciate design systems. Calling this “the death of web craftsmanship” is hyperbolic nonsense. I’ve seen mangled UIs in basically every CSS stack.
I use Tailwind as part of a design system’s component library, but I’ve done the same with many other tools before. As with all libs in a UI stack, there is hype, then there is fit with you and your project. I think we could do with less hype & gripe, and more well considered neutral discussion of ergonomics and technical pros & cons.
I think the article fails to mention that one of the reasons tools like Tailwind (and methodologies like BEM, etc.) exist in the first place is to facilitate bigger organisation sites.
In my personal experience “plain old CSS” isn’t feasible as the number of mainterners on a site goes up. Once there is multiple teams (possibly even across multiple departments) contributing to a site, the cascading part of CSS means that it is more or less unavoidable that some change from one team unintentionally breaks something for another team - and this being visual things means that it is very hard to catch with automated tests.
After having working in a big organisation for a while, most developers will eventually start wishing for something that would make sure that their CSS only applies to their own components.
divtags with inline style attributes suddenly starts to look very attractive - which is what eventually led to something like Tailwind.I’ve seen people, lead and principal engineers, who refuse to learn modern JS, insisting that since it was bad in 2006 its bad today.
It’s still bad, though. That’s not the reason why, but it still is. All the frameworks and things like TypeScript try to work around and hide the uglyness and stupidity of JavaScript, but they neither remove nor fix it. The way HTML was initially designed is the exact opposite of how it is used. It was intended to present data in a standardized way and leave the rendering and styling to the client application. People tried to create pixel-perfect designs with it. The entire resulting technology stack was created by idiots for idiots. And JavaScript is consistent in the misguidedness of the endeavor. All the marketing talk about platform independence is bullshit. It is easier to write platform independent GUI applications in C than in HTML + CSS + JavaScript. All the frameworks and languages transpiling to JavaScript trying to belie that just lead to a breeding ground of incompetent GUI developers doing esotheric coding (“doing it the way it is done” while understanding zilch about the fundament). The resulting developers are useless outside of their steaming pile of web GUI shit. The least worse of them are the ones promoting and perpetuating this failed technology stack by adding further layers of abstraction to try and hide that it is build on and from shit, creating even more esoteric developers in the process - by idiots, for idiots. Web GUI developers are paid less than any other branch of developers and it is completely justified.
It is easier to write platform independent GUI applications in C than in HTML + CSS + JavaScript.
Um, what? There are very few GUI toolkits targeting both desktops and phones, and none of them are reasonably usable from C.
You forgot to read the very small fineprint after the rant hyperbole: *) true for desktop applications. You could go with C++ and QT. Though, writing C++ code is never easy/fun (still better than JavaScript, though). Any argument about natively compiled multi platform GUI applications regarding mobile is moot either way for multiple reasons. The angle I’m going to push here is: Everybody and his mother tries to push their custom iOS and Android apps, relegating web sites to the desktop. Any multi platform GUI toolkit with a cross-compilable language will give you twice the functionality in half the development time over HTML+CSS+JavaScript. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not really suggesting that websites have no place. And there are good reasons to want websites. I’m trying to paint a picture what a horrible absolute clusterfuck the web GUI technology stack is.
Any multi platform GUI toolkit with a cross-compilable language will give you twice the functionality in half the development time over HTML+CSS+JavaScript.
Hundreds of companies have tried to solve this exact problem for years and already did the cost/benefit analysis. It turns out that writing almost all of your code exactly once is cheaper than doing it in the multiple stacks that would be required with whatever your dream architecture is. They are not idiots just because you want them to be.
You sound like someone with zero practical experience in this area who just wants to rant about code purity. The rest of us are trying to get shit done while you pine for a perfect technology stack that will never exist.
You forgot to read the very small fineprint after the rant hyperbole: *) true for desktop applications.
Ignoring phones in 2023 is patent nonsense.
You could go with C++ and QT. Though, writing C++ code is never easy/fun
It’s also ludicrously expensive, so as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.
Everybody and his mother tries to push their custom iOS and Android apps, relegating web sites to the desktop.
Madness. I’m not going to develop and maintain three completely different versions of the same app in perpetuity.
Any multi platform GUI toolkit with a cross-compilable language will give you twice the functionality in half the development time over HTML+CSS+JavaScript.
Maybe it would if one existed.
I’m trying to paint a picture what a horrible absolute clusterfuck the web GUI technology stack is.
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t see any viable alternative.
It’s also ludicrously expensive, so as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.
QT, writing C++, or both? Paying for a good technology can be cheaper in the long run if you save development time. And sure, developing in C++ is more expensive than JavaScript, because you can’t let cheap web code monkeys do it.
Madness
Indeed. But, very common madness.
Maybe it would if one existed.
I think I made it quite clear, that I set the scope for the desktop. There are several. At least QT even includes mobile.
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t see any viable alternative.
It’s nice to “agree to agree” sometimes ;-)
QT, writing C++, or both?
Qt.
Paying for a good technology can be cheaper in the long run if you save development time.
Only until the price gets jacked up beyond what you can afford, and then you’re scrambling to rewrite your entire application to use something else that’s still affordable.
And sure, developing in C++ is more expensive than JavaScript, because you can’t let cheap web code monkeys do it.
An awful lot of code is written in C++, so I’m not sure that was ever a serious constraint.
I think I made it quite clear, that I set the scope for the desktop. There are several.
Sure, if we’re targeting desktop only, then there are lots of options: GTK, wxWidgets, Swing…
But what does it matter? You can’t ignore mobile in 2023.
Lol so you’re one of the devs the author is talking about. Imagine getting this worked up over a topic you clearly don’t understand. “Failed technology stack” – that’s right everyone, the most widely used stack on the planet is a failure because this guy doesn’t like javascript. Everyone else in the world is obviously a stupid moron for not seeing things his way.
If you program in anything other than machine code you are an idiot. Remember that next time you use a failed abstraction like C.
Can’t believe this nonsense actually got upvoted. You never even identify any real issues with modern JS or HTML. It’s just a bunch of run-on whining. “HTML was meant to provide a standardized way for presenting data” – lol so literally how it’s still used today.
At least C has a working equals operator. Go on, tell me about ===, invite the ridicule. I bet I know more about JavaScript than you do. I hate it because I am intimately familiar with it.
console.log(null==0) console.log(null>0) console.log(null>=0) console.log(0==[]) console.log(0=='0') console.log('0'==[]) // no equality comparison, but that shit is funny console.log("2"+"2"-"2")Any proper programming language wouldn’t even compile any of that nonsense.
And something being widespread doesn’t mean it’s either right or good - look at religions.
I mean, for me, the greatest pro I’ve heard for the usage of Tailwind is that it makes collaboration much easier. For example, a PR to add styling to a component is easy to read - you just see the new classes added. Not only that but you know that it only affects that element and that no CSS is still being kept in your CSS files that is no longer being used.
The cascade is seen by some as one of the most annoying parts of CSS at times because it can make debugging harder - and many will simply abuse
!importantas a result.I’d argue that styled components, like Vue SFCs or Surface-ui, are even better in this regard. You can see the whole component there, and all the classes along for the ride. And they’re usually written in something fairly close to “real” CSS
But I mean, if they’re gonna be component specific CSS, why even bother over just using tailwind?
Tailwind only really makes sense in a precise use case that absolutely does not cover everything web based and I wish the makers where clearer about it.
First off, the abstraction problem: since you give up on defining custom classes at length, elements will often receive more than a dozen utility classes. This is fine IF you use a component based framework like Vue and you break down your app into components with a small granularity.
Second, the stylesheet problem: even minified and compressed, a stylesheet containing all of Tailwind’s utility classes is multiple Megabytes. The issue will not come from where you’d expect; downloading may take a while on the first page load, but all page loads will suffer from taking into account such a massive set of rules. Tree shaking makes this fine IF your content is already known at the moment of building the app.
In the end I feel that Tailwind implements ideas on top of tech it is incompatible with and the abstractions it create are seriously leaking.
Ok so use modern frameworks and tools that implement the tailwind plugin. Because if you are shipping the entire tailwind css that’s a developer problem not tailwinds. News flash: using a technology wrong doesn’t make the tech wrong.
News flash: your snark makes you an unpleasant person. Read my comment again. I said tree shaking fixes this… unless you don’t know what content you’ll display and what classes you’ll need at build time. Not all sites are static.
Unless you are going to be allowing custom html to be added the tooling is smart enough to figure out what possible classes your code can use. You’d have to do something dumb to not have the tools able to tell what components you are serving.
So glad people are catching on to this. Until like a month ago if you said anything bad about Tailwind you would literally get shadowbanned on HN.
Isn’t that still the case there?
