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Comment by a-priori | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I just don't see how it's possible to 'forget CSS' with Tailwind. I mean, the classes mostly map 1:1 to CSS properties.

As someone who has been writing CSS for approximately a billion years (actual number more like 13 years) I'm a fan of Tailwind and don't see how it's a 'beginner' thing at all. It solves real-world problems building web applications, and actually many of those problems only come up when you're building large, long-lived applications with many contributing developers which is precisely the kind of thing beginners aren't in charge of.

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Tbh a lot of times when people say beginner they really mean “this is way easier than the way I’m used to, and that freaks me out because it means the old way is redundant, so I’ll claim this is for beginners”

By beginners, I meant people who know HTML and some CSS, but not enough to design a great UI. Tailwind allows them to add a few classnames and the page looks great. On the flip side, you have a developer who can design using CSS. Tailwind comes along and, although it’s great, you’re learning new classnames and now you’re no longer using web standard properties (CSS).

By that definition it would be hard to justify anything besides HTML, JS and CSS. That would also exclude TypeScript and every JS Framework there is on earth. That's hard to justify from every angle (development and business wise) imho.

Justifying using Tailwind, Typescript, JS Framework, etc. comes down to how much value they provide to each user and how much time they save.

For example, building your own type system or JS framework would require a lot more code and man-hours than using margin: 4px vs m-2.

That's not quite the definition they are positing. Many of the classes in Tailwind have near or actual 1:1 mappings to CSS, but with slightly different names or semantics. A better JS analogy might be something like Coffeescript; I remember avoiding it because it felt a bit superfluous and hence not worth the tax (of adding a tool).

With Tailwind, whatever the actual merits, the biggest points of traction (IMHO) are the frankly excellent example sites[1]. You can click through numerous examples, all load quickly and without ads, that give you numerous variations of components, layouts, and even full pages. You can spin up a vanilla HTML or React app and ship good looking pages very quickly, esp. if you are bad at design.

[1]: https://tailwindui.com

I use Tailwind for a SaaS app because of TailwindUI and I'm pretty happy with it. I also used the Marketing page examples to put together a website[1] pretty quickly. When the app UI gets more complicated the need for design skills definitely creeps in. But, taking a step back, using a wireframing tool like Balsamiq, and having another look through the component catalog has gotten me pretty far. I'm happy with our ability to ship quickly.

[1]: https://truerev.com

Just an FYI, the logo on the site you posted gets deformed on mobile when there’s not enough space for it and the buttons on the right to live all on the same line.

This makes no sense. Tailwind is just another way of writing CSS, it's not premade styles.

> Tailwind allows them to add a few classnames and the page looks great

How is this the case any more than "raw CSS allows them to add a few styles and the page looks great"? You can't just haphazardly throw styles onto the page and it'll magically look good cause it was made in Tailwind. You design the exact same way you would if you were writing raw CSS, it's just you're putting the styles in the HTML class tags instead of modifying the CSS directly.

A person who's bad at CSS is not gonna be any better with Tailwind.

I wonder if the parent is mixing tailwind-ui and tailwind itself.

I don't see how tailwind makes it easy to design beautiful pages, not in an easier way than CSS.

What it does is ensuring Locality of Behaviour, and css properties not leaking in other component of a web application.

It's essentially the same as css scoped to a single component.

> I don't see how tailwind makes it easy to design beautiful pages, not in an easier way than CSS.

If you copy the examples in the Tailwind docs it looks like your ripped off Stripe. If you copy the examples in the MDN css docs it looks like you ripped off a decade old govt site.

Making your own class names arent a standard either. I dont see why you would reinvent and abstract things over and over again in every project?

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