Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikivi | Hacker News Reader

Was always curious, why it was Tailwind that won 'utility-first css' and not https://tachyons.io which did this approach first.

View on HN

Exactly! Tachyons was awesome and ahead of its time but its core design system wasn't as well made as Tailwind's is.

Also, to be fair, Tailwind's marketing game is out of this world as well. They are literally some of the best developer marketers on this planet!

You can create (or recreate) Tachyons using Tailwind, and take advantage of all the bells and whistles that the later offers that the former does not.

Can you give some examples of what they did marketing wise that helped it being adopted more widely than Tachyons?

Adam Wathan actually wrote about it:

https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

I think one of the most powerful things was making a course then giving it away - really goes far to boost your prominence as a developer and building those lists.

They wrote a book that is pretty popular. Thanks to their connections with the Laravel leadership they got Tailwind as a somehow default for the front-end in Laravel. I dont know if it is organic or not, but there are dozens of articles about Tailwind coming up daily in sites like Medium and Dev.to.

Have you seen the trailer for Tailwind 2?

https://youtu.be/3u_vIdnJYLc

Tailwind is also like half a megabyte minified and zipped vs Tachyons 20kb.

But who uses all those tokens from the full tailwind build? Maybe if you use the CDN build?

That's why purgecss is builtin. It's dead simple to setup and you'll have only the used classes in your CSS output.

I agree, I've just seen this kind of thing before and have low expectations of what people will do with it.

Basically I'm expecting people to be lazy and use the full thing. Especially the CDN build.

I think the biggest thing is documentation. Tachyons has basically none, the only way you would even know that you can do responsive design with it for example is by reading all of the CSS.

Case in point from this very thread:

> i'm trying to find it in the docs - but how do you apply a different border on mobile, tablet and desktop via tachyons?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333465

You can't cross the chasm from early adopter tinkerer types to the more mainstream community without teaching people how to use your tool.

I think it's because of the hardcore minimalism of the creators or Tachyons and also Theme UI, it lacks mass appeal because of it. If you dig into Steve Schogers style (the guy behind Refactoring UI and Tailwind aesthetics) you'll see that he's more in the Streamline Moderne camp than Bauhaus minimalism, his stuff looks more "designed" in the sense of how non designers think about good design. Tachyons is kinda invisible..

Ha, you kids! What about the REAL project that kicked off atomic styling: https://acss.io pioneered by Thierry Koblentz and friends while at Yahoo.

Everything that came since is just a variant, in principle, of that. It never gets the props!

Tailwind creator is mates with the Laravel creator so got a big boost in eyeballs from that. I guess Tachyons didn't have that.

If I can be honest the name is a pain in the arse to remember too

great documentation, good 'outreach' presence around the interwebs from the team, sensible class naming (tachyons can get a little...eh, imo), the build possibilities are quite nice (tho may be as flexible in tachyons...haven't used it in quite some time), responsive everything (mostly), the laravel bump as mentioned - all in all an evolution of previous attempts that resonates better i guess.

Great marketing (and this is from a huge fan of Tailwind). Marketing, even for OSS projects, is incredibly important.

I still use Tachyons which I find way better. It*s just a css mapper with much saner design decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com