Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Informal poll: is bootstrap over?

Nope. Some people don't want fuss over UI to the extent that tailwind forces you. Some of us want an opinionated Sass-based framework out of the box. The only advantage I've found using Tailwind is anal-level control over details when bootstrap already has a uniform ecosystem with far, far fewer classes. The former requires way more upfront cost to get running, where the latter is done at day one. Only downside is the tree-shaking in bootstrap, it would be nice if it could be made smaller during a Next/Nuxt/webpack build.

These tailwind component libraries make little sense if you compare them directly to bootstrap without wanting to work with tailwind.

Tailwind is in every way superior when you are implementing a bespoke design, you develop faster, your CSS is small and less complex, the output is performant, you have a uniform mini-language, if you apply some up front analysis of a design/-system you can generate 90% of your CSS from a normalized configuration.

Now compare that to fighting default styles and complected component styles, applying overrides, extending via SCSS variables and generating your own CSS utilities with SCSS. It's pretty night and day for this use-case.

Component libs for tailwind that compress the classes are a bit funny and IMO you don't get much benefit from them other than playing nice with tailwind. You might have a reason to use tailwind but want predefined component classes? But then you get the same disadvantage that component based libraries like bootstrap have, so the choice is arbitrary here.

What makes _much_ more sense is what tailwindui does, they give you the raw source, so you get to write out of the box components quickly but can pull them apart without friction.

I don't think you listened to me, because you said this:

> Now compare that to fighting default styles and complected component styles

As I said, I am NOT fighting default styles. I want them.

I don't WANT to write my own components, just change colors with Sass (and maybe some affordances).

I'm an engineer, not a UX designer, and I don't have budget to hire a UX designer (nor do I pretend to be good at UX like most programmers). Bootstrap is ideal for my situation, and many others in my position.

Also, what are you talking about? Tailwind absolutely does NOT give you out of the box components. Only third-parties, like DaisyUI and OP's link are fully formed components (or the links off of the tailwind page), which are at best like bootstrap and at worse an inconsistent mess.

> Also, what are you talking about? Tailwind absolutely does NOT give you out of the box components.

Well, no. And that's by design. Should you want components, there's an official Tailwind UI[0] that the dgb23 also mentioned. Not to mention the uncountable amount of open-source component libraries.

[0]: https://tailwindui.com/

Yes I get that, I wanted to illustrate the use case for tailwind (bespoke design) and why it makes sense there and how component libs can still be useful if delivered in raw form. I didn’t want to imply that your use case isn’t valid.

I expect Bootstrap will live on for a long time, but the era of it being either the trendy or obvious choice is over.

When Bootstrap debuted, its big strength was that it gave you a decent UI for little effort, at a time when the popular alternative was `vim styles.css`.

Needs and tools have shifted. Fewer projects get their UI from a programmer with no design sense. More projects need more widgets that aren't available off-the-shelf. Component-based web frameworks make it easier to build reusable widgets in-house.

(I think in didn't help that it took Bootstrap forever to stop depending on jQuery, and SPAs got popular and didn't need jQuery but did need to reduce page weight)

Not for me. Bootstrap is very mature, has sane UX, is adaptable, has a good balance between general styles and utility classes. I find that Tailwind clutters your HTML and I fail to see the benefit over writing pure CSS in isolated components in a framework like e.g. Svelte. The reason I would use a CSS framework in the first place is to avoid having to write everything from scratch myself. All (the free parts of) Tailwind affords is an indirect way of writing styles using classes. In that case you might as well bite the bullet and learn CSS properly.

Think about it this way, most developers should have been familiar with CSS, utility classes is a shorthand that make its easy to remember and find user defined class if you have tried Tailwind 3, I found it solve all of my checklists.

Like Bootstrap way, you can still define that with Tailwind classes either in input.css with @apply directive (abstract out utility classes from HTML) or Tailwind configuration. It’s a way to speed up our development.

I use it and still like it...

Except 5.1 that broke my homemade dark theme implementation with their use of css variables ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com