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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

I had to stop immediately at “Tailwind makes code hard to read” and you’re telling me your home rolled css solution is any easier to read and understand? I would very much argue against that, as a home grown solution comes with zero precedent about how it works, so you have to go reverse engineer it from one or more source files, whereas tailwind is tailwind is tailwind in every file in every codebase.

It’s okay if you don’t like something, but if you’re going to publish a hate piece like this you’re going to get criticism like this.

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Isn't this true of any code though? How is CSS class naming any different than the naming of types and functions? It's easier to read and understand because it's an abstraction.

Something like...

    <div class="button button-primary">

...isn't going to confuse anyone. I believe tailwind is hard to read because it's basically just inlining everything tersely with very little abstraction at all.

Yeah but that is the easiest example imaginable. The problem is not a button class its the card-left-wrapper-container class that you have to use to style something the right way.

It basically boils down to naming things for me. The author says it's a good thing. I don't think so. Most of the time in plain CSS we have to come up with arbitrary names, that introduce confusion and bugs later on.

Utility classes, while sometimes cumbersome to read, always state their intent.

What's the tailwind equivalent of `card-left-wrapper-container`? I imagine it's 200 characters wide.

Based on the name I'm going to assume that the class is used on container for a layout with cards on the left.

Utility classes don't state their intent they state their literal contents. If the intent is to be a button or be a wrapper-container then that's in a well conceived class name.

> Most of the time in plain CSS we have to come up with arbitrary names, that introduce confusion and bugs later on.

If the names are arbitrary then of course have problems! If you code and made up arbitrary names for functions you'd also have problems. The point of the name is to add clarity and abstract out details I don't need to know. I don't need to know that buttons have a certain padding, margin, etc when I'm placing them on a form. And I don't need to know everywhere they are placed when I style them.

> Based on the name I'm going to assume that the class is used on container for a layout with cards on the left.

That's funny my intention was to name a wrapper around a container inside of card that is usually used on the left side. But of course we had different contexts in mind and a lot of these issues can be sorted out by coding conventions.

The thing is I was never able to wrap my head around the whole separation of concerns thing, when it comes to HTML, CSS and JS. I think that is because I come from a mobile dev background where we always had some kind of markup (or just plain code) which described the elements and how they looked. The structure of the UI and the styling were always co-located.

Coming to the web I was very confused of why you would want to separate both of them. And in my opinion we can see that change not only in TailwindCSS, Tachyon or ChakraUI but also in component based JS frameworks as well. Everything is about colocation these days, which makes it much easier to reason about what is going on in this small, little, pocket of code in my application.

I like that change. :)

You can create components by aggregating the utility classes in tailwind. In fact, the documentation recommends this approach for production[1]. So if you want your "button" class, you can have your "button" class.

The reason tailwindcss has so many proponents is arguably because of its compositional design, but it's paradoxically not one of the first things people seem to talk about when they're discussing tailwind. They fixate on its utility-first design. I think this does it a significant disservice.

No, I don't know why. I'm not a designer.

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components

At this point you might as well use normal CSS.

> Utility classes, while sometimes cumbersome to read, always state their intent.

CSS properties always state their intent as well and IMO are even more explicit in what they are doing.

It’s more about using established and documented systems vs creating new ones (where you probably don’t have documentation). Even if you do have a home grown solution that is as well documented as tailwind, you are still at a loss because nobody will be familiar with it already.

Yeah I disagree with this. The point of writing code is create new systems. We have literally dozens of applications at my company all with the same look and feel. We, of course, created a new system that defines that look and feel. Just like we create classes, and methods, and components to maintain that. Ignoring the power of CSS to abstract style is a waste of it's potential.

Now that's not to say we don't use established libraries for CSS. But we definitely add our classes and add our customization.

I don’t mean to never create systems, I never said that, did it come across as me implying this? To explicit state my intent, it’s that you should strive to create as few new systems as necessary, but you’re very obviously going to need to create SOMETHING...?

I guess I don't understand your reply. This is a critique of tailwind and the best you can say about it is that it's an existing documented system somebody else might know? I love standards, there are so many to choose from, but on the face of it tailwind doesn't seem like the best standard to choose.

In places where I might find tailwind appropriate, I could use just the even more common standard of bare CSS properties.

It's okay to agree to disagree haha, at the end of the day what works best for you personally is what you should use!

You assume that whoever reads the code next already knows Tailwind. They do not.

Tailwind might be simple, but it is undoubtedly opaque. A CSS class defined in the same application is not.

Tailwind has documentation is the massive difference.

So does CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

The author lost me with "Tailwind is bloated." If it's bloated, you're doing it wrong. One of the main benefits is that you can run a command that creates a custom CSS file that only include the classes you need.

...and it's explicitly mentioned in the manual, which makes me wonder, how someone quoting it (and thus pretends that has read it), missed that part. Most points are pure FUD imo, except the one talking about vertical space, and I believe it's exaggerated.

I think the author is arguing for using something like styled-jsx, which is the same as vue SFC styles afaik. That stays fairly manageable and readable as well.

But it also is as “visually noisy” as tailwind. So it fails at his first point.

Also the tailwind is bloated is disingenuous given you just remove the unused classes as Pty of your build.

Bad faith points all around, maybe except the obscure naming in tailwind. But alternatives like Hucssley solve this (name the properties the same as their css counterparts)

This seems like an appeal to authority or popularity. While we're at it, might as well just pick the most popular library without further thought, because you couldn't possibly make a better choice, and one that everyone chooses must be intrinsically better.

If you're going to offer "criticism like this", at least have something more to go on. It's not that ambitious to find a more readable solution, if a popular choice seems flawed. That's just a single hurdle to overcome.

How do you feel about the other seemingly valid points he made from a large production project perspective?

Just write some SCSS and try to maintain fidelity between your nested css with the structure of your DOM. Even easier with SFC.

This lol.

&hover, &active, etc.. fuck that.

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