I was very much against frameworks initially: tailwind, bootstrap etc. However, when I started really building sites & apps using components, I found tailwind made my life a lot easier, so I could easily see and change styling while writing code/html, and it would only affect that component.

Beforehand, I was trying to come up with names for CSS classes all the time, and then I'd change one thing, and fuck up styling on a diff page.

[–] Karjalan@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago

Honestly love tailwind. Once you get used to all the names/abbreviations and how they work with sizes and states etc. it's much easier to see what's happening when eyeballing code.

Makes reviewing and bug fixing easier too.

I get that early on it feels annoying. I recall disliking it the first time I learnt it, but then when I went back to regular css and classes I really missed it.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Now it is remembering tags for property instead.

[–] moriquende@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Any passable editor nowadays does the heavy lifting for you, you can usually even write the CSS tag you want and it'll show you the options.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Except that you learn the class names once and re-use them across all your projects, whereas CSS classes are different for every single project.

[–] moriquende@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Yep, a component is a good abstraction level, no point in making life difficult by creating and coming up with names for smaller parts.

[–] ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It helps to avoid the specificity problem. You don’t have to manage a complicated class system, you just set styles directly on the elements. Yes this is pretty much what everyone agreed in the past was the worst thing to do but that was before things like CSS variables existed (which Tailwind uses excessively) that lets you control details like color and fonts from a single point. So you don’t have to go through every component to change the brand color.

At work we don’t use Tailwind often but in our React apps we mostly use Theme-UI which lets us write regular CSS on each element in a nice JSON format instead of the class name hell that is Tailwind. This is my preferred way.

[–] 5opn0o30@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This is very informative. I avoided Tailwind for the reason you mentioned, but look closer now that I know the difference.

[–] ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 days ago

I think it's especially great for smaller apps/sites or prototyping. Setup is quick if you're already comfortable with CLI tools and configs. Or if you just want to get started immediately with no setup, just add a script into your site and when it needs to go into production later you can still do the setup process for a robust build.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Why Tailwind if you have CSS variables?

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

People fear what seems foreign. Devs want css to be like a programming language and it's not so they're uncomfortable. Or at least this is my unvarnished opinion

[–] PolarKraken@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago

For me it's less about fear and more about having a limited budget of time and effort to spend on learning things, so CSS and front end generally gets deprioritized. But that's cuz I'm a back end kinda dev in my soul, lol.

I've seen the good points you've made elsewhere in this thread - I would indeed react very poorly to willy-nilly back end changes and I think you're right that people don't give CSS and visual styling the same degree of professional respect when making changes. And that sucks.

[–] Havald@lemmy.world -1 points 4 days ago

Tailwind sounds cooler than CSS, which, I presume, would be important when you're applying at a startup.