Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

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> One unfortunate side effect of things like Tailwind CSS is that some folks with a single-minded focus on looks are now using only the Tailwind class names, but you can do both. If before you'd have written something like class="video-thumbnail" and styled the content with a class selector in your CSS, but now you've adopted Tailwind and have excised all the descriptive class name from the content

Are you really suggesting that people should make Cascading Style Sheets do more than styling? We have literal entire specs for using correct attributes for accessibility and microformats. WAI, ARIA, and so on.

Furthermore, from the authors of Tailwind, Headless UIhttps://headlessui.com/ is a collection of fully unstyled logic components with their primary concern being accessibility (done correctly, with aforementioned attributes, not random class names). At no point have users or maintainers of Tailwind tried to steer people away from including accessibility or microdata in their designs.

This feels like an incredibly thinly veiled attack on Tailwind by the ever vocal anti-Tailwind interest group for something it shouldn't be doing anyway.

> Are you really suggesting that people should make Cascading Style Sheets do more than styling?

No. I'm talking about the class attribute, not style sheets. The single-minded minded Web developers with a focus only on styling that I mentioned seem to have formed the belief that class names are just "a CSS thing" (or something)—and that's the problem.

> At no point have users or maintainers of Tailwind tried to steer people away from including accessibility or microdata in their designs.

K. Who're you arguing with you here?

> This feels like an incredibly thinly veiled attack on Tailwind by the ever vocal anti-Tailwind interest group

Consider that leaping to conclusions like this indicates that you might be living in a bubble. (See "single-minded focus".) I'm not part of some rival frontend gang. I don't even exist in the milieu—the world is way bigger than visual designers doing Web work who spend their discretionary time talking about the trade.

> The single-minded minded Web developers with a focus only on styling

Again with the attacks.

There is no evidence that eg Google uses arbitrary class names in order to index metadata over the accepted standards of microdata.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

Given I know what microdata is, when to use it, and how it's different to CSS, I'm not sure what bubble this would be. Perhaps the one that is familiar with Google crawling?

Where do you see an attack there...? That quote is a completely anodyne, factual description. There is zero pejorative (or even emotional content in it, for that matter).

> There is no evidence that eg Google uses arbitrary class names in order to[...]

Again: who are you arguing with? Every response you've written here has the quality of being written as if addressing someone or something that doesn't even appear in the discussion.

> I'm not sure what bubble this would be

The one that goes (roughly), "clearly I am addressing a fellow tradesperson who is biased against other factions, and therefore it is reasonable to declare this to be a thinly veiled attack that I have assumed it is". If you spend your time squabbling with colleagues (and/or trying to deflect attacks on Twitter[1]), and when you come across someone you immediately leap to the conclusion that they're working against you[1] on professional–ideological grounds, then there might be some bubble-backed paranoia at work.

I don't care about your opinionated in-trade squabbles. I don't occupy either "side" of the debate that you've tried to insert me into* any more than your aunts and uncles and grandparents do. (What are their thoughts on going with Tailwind versus not? I suppose they'll let you know when they get their first client for frontend work and it comes up—or even could come up—right? Me too. Until then...)

* and this is all not even to mention—as the other person who responded to you pointed out—that the position you attributed to me is completely opposite of what I actually wrote

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332525>

You opened by saying that "folks" are using Tailwind CSS instead of your preferred arbitrary class names that would mean nothing to browsers. Tailwind is a styling tool. There is nothing stopping you from using additional random class names you believe might make a difference to search engines - there is also nothing encouraging you to do that either other than a footnote in the HTML spec.

I don't know why you don't remember you opened with that, but, after seeing attacks like "single minded", "bubbles", "professional ideological grounds", merely for telling you that in the real world people are not using CSS class names in the way you want them to be and are instead using microdata, I won't be engaging in this pointless debate further.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

> There is nothing stopping you from using additional random class names

Congratulations on arriving at the realization that matches exactly what I wrote out in my first message. That you can include both was my entire thesis, dude!

That you missed that and feel that "single-minded"[1] is an attack[2] explains the conflict here. You're reading things out of comments that aren't actually written there[3] and failing to read out of them what actually is.

I'm glad that this exchange is over.

1. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/single-minded>: Intensely focused and concentrated on purpose, thinking of only one goal, undistractable.

2. Are you perhaps mistaking it with "small-minded"?

3. That stuff, along with being able to "make a difference to search engines" mentioned, once again. Why? To reiterate—in response to what, exactly? Who are you arguing with?

> Are you really suggesting that people should make Cascading Style Sheets do more than styling?

The parent made no such suggestion. You seem to be conflating the purpose of HTML classes with CSS. Here's a note from the "literal entire spec"[0], which other commenters have already pointed out:

> […] authors are encouraged to use values that describe the nature of the content, rather than values that describe the desired presentation of the content.

Furthermore, the parent took great pains not to attack Tailwind, instead pointing out that the two different approaches could easily coexist.

If you'd like to use class names solely as CSS hooks, go right ahead, but citing "correct attributes" is ironic at best.

[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#global-attri...

There is no evidence that eg Google uses arbitrary class names in order to index metadata over the accepted standards of microdata.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

I'm not Google but when I write a scraper I frequently use class selectors to pick out data. It's a rare occasion when all the information I need from a page is tagged as microdata.

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