I suppose a library of common elements is a good thing to have, but the reason I like Tailwind is that I can use the utilities at first and then easily gather them together as plain CSS classes as and when that makes sense to me.
2) It has variants for hover, etc (e.g.: class="bg-black hover:bg-white"). AFAIK you can't do that with inline styles.
3) I find it plays nicely with a workflow where I start out not knowing exactly what I'm doing, which is almost all of the time. I can smash ahead and do things in the class="" of each tag, then as I notice that I'm repeating myself, I grab small chunks of the class list and put them in '@apply's in a CSS file. Bottom-up, liek.
The class lists are just a lot more manageable than inline styles. They're copy-pastable and really easy to read when you get used to it, as long as the lists aren't too long.
https://frontstuff.io/no-utility-classes-arent-the-same-as-i...
But in terms of structuring your code, there are related concepts in other areas of programming:
The most general concept applied here is stratification or layering. You want to decompose your code into more general pieces so you can use those pieces to compose the actual solutions.
Example: Say you wanted to write a compiler. It typically much easier to simplify, AKA decompose the compiler into a scanner, parser, analyzer, optimizer, emitter etc. The users of your compiler probably don't care that you decomposed and layered your code. But you do care, since you can reason about your code in terms of small/local problems. Maybe you don't stop there. Your scanner can be stratified further, so you can easily build evolve and reason about it.
This is the primary thing these types of libraries do. They give you generalized building blocks that have compositional semantics that make sense. You can use their sane defaults or generate them from scratch using a design system.
Secondly the atoms are discretely defined. You're not dealing with all possible values for each property but with sets that you can join/compose. The generated classes have this little mini-syntax that you first need to get used to a bit, but after a while you'll easily remember the prefix schema of your classes (Tailwind's documentation site is also very well made). Tailwind cross joins the atoms for you, but then also deletes all the classes you didn't use in your project.
What's the point in spending 20 hours learning some custom interface that's only used in like 5% of projects and will probably be gone in 5 years, when you could spend 30 hours learning the standard that's been around for decades and understand every library for years to come?
Just learn CSS, it's not that hard.
I never sat down for hours to learn it. I just started using it. Most of the classes were very intuitive with a working knowledge of the box model. For anything else I just searched the docs or even better, got the VSCode plugin to suggest the correct one
It's not a custom interface. It's just classes. It's got a type of syntax, sure, especially for media queries but it's not much different than "learning" the classes from bootstrap
It's literally just CSS but abstracted as convenient classes as the name "utility classes" implies already. I don't understand why people keep telling others to learn CSS instead. I also hate dealing and writing CSS cause it's cumbersome and unwieldy and this is a much better way of styling my HTML and getting immediate feedback
That way you get the full tailwind experience without the tedious rewriting of components.