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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I hear so many people recommend Tailwind but every time I look at examples it reminds me of an entry for the 17th Annual Esoteric Programming Language Competition.

Maybe you get used to it but hell it looks hard to parse visually.

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Tailwind is definitely a Marmite framework (either you love it or you hate it). Yes it can be difficult to read. And it can be difficult to debug and fix something where you make a small change and it cascades 'upwards' somehow. But... the problems I have with Tailwind are no different to the ones I had with CSS and all the various magic methodologies that were supposed to "fix" css - things like BEM & SMACCS). But the big difference is that I can solve those problems in a fraction of the time with Tailwind. As a last resort you can just strip out all the classes of the elements in question and start over. If I had to do that with normal CSS, it would almost definitely break something somewhere else. With Tailwind, you are working in a highly localised area and can see everything you need on one screen. That, to me, is the power of Tailwind.

There's something about Tailwind (which I use, love, and evangelize to all who will listen and many who won't) that makes me think of the phrase "You can't fire me, I quit!"

Yes. The true test of a CSS framework is how easily you can change it without breaking shit. I haven’t found a better solution than Tailwind in that regard. Emotion comes close but it also encourages you to componentize everything, which can cause change issues. In Tailwind I found my components disappear because I didn’t need them.

All CSS is hard to parse visually.

Unless you follow very strict development guidelines, you do not really know anything unless you look at the computed styles in a debugging tool.

I think Tailwind does help wrangle some of that cognitive overhead with its naming system.

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