Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

I've always been a bit apprehensive of Tailwind but with the latest JIT compiler it actually seems usable. I'm happy to see it getting more use for mainstream applications but I wish it wasn't the "default" for a lot of open source projects.

For example, several of the next.js examples[1] use tailwind without explicitly stating so, because I guess it's just become a ubiquitous as css stylesheets or modules for some people. The problem I find is that it adds opinion and mental overhead for people learning related technologies or trying to get a head start without an opinionated styling solution. In order to use something like the blog-starter example for next.js I have to go and learn tailwind and then come back before I can use their blog starter, where as CSS is universal. CSS works with every project, without depending on Tailwind.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing newer improvements to Tailwind, but I hope that people will consider it an alternative to something like Bootstrap instead of an alternative to CSS.

[1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/blog-...

> For example, several of the next.js examples[1] use tailwind without explicitly stating so, because I guess it's just become a ubiquitous as css stylesheets or modules for some people

I used Bootstrap for years and give MDO major props. I learned Tailwindcss actually because it was starting to show up everywhere and many of the Next.js examples were using it. Now that I have used it I would say it changes how you think about css and styling - it gives you more power and more guardrails and it also then ships a smaller css load to the client. It was always a struggle to carve away the parts of Bootstrap you weren't using.

I'm sure it's very nice to use (I've been learning it in the past week), and I think it's a great alternative to Bootstrap. Personally, I'm not fully sold on it as a 100% alternative to styling with css (not least because you can't do pseudo element styling and have to add another node to the DOM). As someone who knows CSS, when I look at a template which uses tailwind I get overwhelmed because I have to mentally process what the 20 classes per node do in combination, where as I can look at a CSS module and (usually) instantly understand what's going on. Sure, once you've done a few tutorials and installed the VSCode extension you'll be able to find out what they do, but the code becomes almost unreadable for people not familiar with Tailwind.

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