I see that bad developers could make mistakes, but besides that, which is kind of easy to lint, the only advantage I see is the need to maintain only one file instead of two.
What do I get wrong?
edit: syntax
If I need to add some padding, I slap on some p-4, my browser refreshes, and I see the result.
I don't really get the spiritual debate. It's a tool, use it or don't.
And for me, at least, this is not a spiritual debate. On the contrary, this is a very practical debate. The popularity of the tool and the signal it conveys absolutely has consequences on all of the development community. Whether I like Tailwind or not, I have to maintain projects that were done with it, I get asked about it, etc.
I think that saying "it's just a tool" is kind of short-sighted. It's a paradigm. And as such, its practical implications are far reaching.
I'm stuck on some rather legacy (read: fashionable 5 years ago) stack either way, but its interesting that I'm conducting an interview later today where the applicant ensured to exhibit a Next/Tailwind/TS app that runs on Vercel.
I can't blame them either, I remember interviewing two summers ago and being asked if I had experience with Next straight out the gate despite it not being mentioned anywhere in the job description.
The "traditional" approach to authoring HTML and CSS is predicated upon on idea of separating concerns. The idea is that your HTML should not depend on your CSS, and your CSS should not depend on your HTML.
The "utility-first" approach reacts by claiming this is wrong. It goes on to reason that either HTML depends on CSS or CSS depends on HTML, but neither are independent. This is what Adam Wathan calls "dependency direction."[0]
0. https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...