Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

I have a really hard time seeing someone use Tailwind as a shortcut because they don't know CSS. That comment does not say what you think it is. They are not saying they use it because they don't know CSS.

The maintenance is what makes Tailwind awesome. I've written CSS professionally since Internet Explorer 6 and have gone through many different strategies for writing maintainable CSS (BEM, OOCSS, SCSS and multiple different CSS-in-JS methods) but Tailwind is the first time I actually feel relieved of all the issues. To me, it's such an enormous improvement from normal CSS that people arguing against it feels like someone trying to convince me not to use syntax highlighting.

View on HN

Funny, to me arguing for Tailwind is like arguing for copy pasting code around instead of using functions and classes, which the Tailwind devs literally tell you to do by the way. I mean, when I saw their official recommendation for maintenance of code and reusing styles was to use multiple cursors, I had to laugh out loud.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles

No it's more like functional programming with small, single-purpose elements. Semantic CSS is more like object oriented programming with big bloated classes with poorly designed and leaky abstractions.

I'm not sure what type of functional programming you're doing but I've never come across Tailwind like abstraction analogs in Haskell.

The point is that I will never go back to not using syntax highlight, and I'm sure you understand that it would be futile trying to convince me otherwise. I wouldn't take anyone doing that seriously, and similarly I can't take you seriously.

Yes, being able to copypaste self-contained HTML with all styling included and no depedencies is amazing.

That's nice for you. Similarly, I cannot take anything recommending copy pasting code seriously either, and I'm sure you understand that it would be futile trying to convince me otherwise. I wouldn't take anyone doing that seriously, and similarly I can't take you seriously.

The difference here is that we're not trying to force you to use Tailwind. You asked "What is it about everyone using Tailwind?" and we responded, but you refuse to accept our answers and keep arguing that we're uninformed and wrong for using something we love.

Your copy pasting analogy makes no sense because "syntax highlighting" was referring to you trying to convince me to stop using something I can't live without and had nothing to do with Tailwind. Anyway, nothing wrong with copy pasting code and avoid premature abstractions until they are needed. Being religious about DRY and trying to shoehorn subsequent iterations of similar code into an inflexible abstraction leads to unmaintainable monstrosities.

I don't think you understood the analogy in what I was saying. The finality of your statements regarding you being unable to take me seriously is the exact same thing I could say to you, which is why I phrased it the way I did. You like Tailwind, fine, use it. I don't, but don't try to convince me to use it, just like there's no way I could convince you to not use syntax highlighting.

Arguably, html+css is not code though.

Copy pasting text*, then.

To me, it seems more like favoring composition of small parts over inheritance of everything.

That's what CSS is, a HUGE inheritance graph, just even more convoluted, because absolutely every "class" is part of the same graph.

If you're not using scoped styles, yes. However, in an apps these days most people use something like CSS modules or CSS in JS which automatically scope styles. Creating classes is to me more of a composable model that still preserves the ability to refactor easily as well as being able to be readable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com