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Comment by iamsanteri | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason behind Tailwind’s emergence and prominence is React, mostly.

I agree, it feels like it was a reaction (no pun intended) for the CSS-in-JSS trend which started in React and complicated with Webpack pipelines. In my mind, Tailwind is just "Bootstrap for CSS-in-JSS."

Honestly, as much as I disliked the CSS-in-JSS trend, it did solve a reasonable problem with React — one which Vue and others had solved with their SPC.

It feels like ducktape on top of ducktape...

Exactly. Tailwind and CSS-in-JS are both a reaction to the limitations of React JSX and how poorly it treats HTML and CSS.

If Vue/Svelte had gotten the popularity React has you would see a lot more people realizing that SFCs and scoped style blocks solve most of the problems people poorly solved with CSS-in-JS.

Tailwind has some other benefits to it like good token setup and ability to copy paste from project to project and have it just work, but the mess it makes of your templates and the difficulty of then editing it down the line doesn't make those benefits worth it.

I would say it is more the lower entry barrier for devs who do not want to spend time on learning css so they are not that relient anymore on a dedicated frontend person

+1. Learnt CSS through tailwind much faster than I did when trying to learn raw CSS

How do you know that?

I'd say to be good with Tailwindcss you actually need a pretty comprehensive understanding of CSS already! Originally I'd written it off as "CSS for backend developers who hate writing frontend code" and I was a diehard CSS purist, but actually using it, it definitely has a great DX for people who love writing component UI/styling.

I hate writing styling because I suck at design.

But Tailwind works for me because:

- it gives good defaults (from sizes and distances to color palettes)

- it's documentation is heavenly, and helps you find the precise thing you're looking for in seconds

I actually leveled up my understanding of CSS thanks to Tailwind :)

I believe it is an even better match if you have components in a template system (without jsx), because you can just copy the html without maintaining some css in js. You can quickly have something similar to components in Django thanks to this.

As one of the person cheering for it, i would say the opposite.

Tailwind is super successful from people that have an aversion to React. Like all my mostly backend devs friends.

New React docs recommends Next, and Next will soon recommend Tailwind in create-next-app (still in canary). https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1636654046474805249

> create-next-app now asks if you want to start with Tailwind CSS instead of CSS Modules.

No, it’s more so because Adam and Steve are super cool and involved frontend dudes.

Steve was the personal designer for Taylor Otwell and Laravel long before Tailwind. Steve has created all the most recent Laravel designs for many years.

Prior to starting Tailwind with Adam, Steve wrote up a bunch of fronted design standards and published a book called Refactoring UI. In that time frame, he also created a bunch of free open sourced sets of SVG icons called HeroIcons. HeroIcons were a direct replacement and improvement over Font Awesome.

Somewhere in that timeline, Adam and Steve put everything they had created together into a single project, and that was called Tailwind CSS.

Being on the ground floor of Laravel and the open source community totally helped with their initial exposure. All the things I mentioned above were also popular topics here on HN a year before Tailwind was created.

https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://heroicons.com/ https://twitter.com/steveschoger

I don’t understand the downvotes lol.. I’m sorry if I come off as staning for Steve, but I feel that he deserves his credit. You can see his design principals being used on every Shopify checkout page, and every Stripe dashboard page.

I personally met him pre COVID at Laracon, Chicago. I bumped into him during lunch, and he was super cool and open to chat.

I have no affiliation with him, and have only followed him on Twitter after we met.

Emergence and prominence of components and more-or less complex UIs.

React is just the most prominent of them all.

React was unique in that it didn’t have a solution for CSS out of the box. Vue, and the current gen frameworks like Svelte, include CSS right inside the component.

Tailwind is just as usable in those :)

Me and my team use Tailwind inside Vue 3 and we love it :) It's not just about "all in 1 file".

Same here. Started a new project at work using Vue 3 and absolutely loved it. I ran with tailwind looking for sanity after being on a few teams/projects where the CSS was all fuckered up. Now I get to roll out features with a perfect UI. It is fun.

For the amount of time that a typical web app lives, raw CSS is just a resiculous waste of time that sucks the joy out.

And marketing. Lots and lots of marketing.

Marketing is good for awareness but it’s not good for retention. It has retention because of product market fit.

On the contrary, I think it is good for retention, so long as you gain enough mindshare soon enough. Tailwind has become something of the defacto CSS tool for modern front end development. I don't think Tachyons or Basscss (or other earlier atomic CSS libraries for that matter) ever caught on despite being the same idea, and neither were marketed as aggressively as Tailwind.

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