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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed opinions seeing Tailwind on that list.

If you're not a designer, it takes a non-trivial amount of time to add the utility classes you need to get something that looks passable. Quite simply, it gives you too much control over something that just doesn't matter for an MVP.

There are great component libraries out there (I'm a fan of Chakra) that give you sane defaults so that you can get something off the ground, while not focusing on something that doesn't matter at the MVP stage.

Maybe Tailwind + Radix makes more sense after you raise funding...?

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That's the niche for https://tailwindui.com - which is how the Tailwind creators make money. If you're convinced by the overall Tailwind philosophy, it's a steal at the price they charge.

Couldn’t agree more. Tailwind css is great, but TailwindUI is where the wins are.

I love using it and despite being crap at design, I’ve managed to put some stuff together that I think is not half bad. (And I remain mighty impressed with their business plan, too!)

Personally I feel like TailwindUI is a missed opportunity.

Their opposition to abstracted utility classes means that anything you want to do has incredibly long, unreadable classes. Its quite a bit of work to abstract away the bits that you want.

https://daisyui.com is my absolute sweet spot for abstraction. Its a bit limited, especially compared to TwUI and flowbite but its developer experience is a joy.

Oh man this is wonderful, thanks for the recommendation!

DaisyUI looks great. Thanks for the rec!

I don’t use frameworks like React or Vue because my apps are small and mostly just for me, so I wish there were component libraries out there like Chakra that didn’t require npm, yarn, or some other package manager to install, and then a framework to use. I just want to slap a CDN link in my HEAD tag of my vanilla HTML page and start using class names to create components. Ideally, these components would have behavior functionality as well so I don’t have to use another library like HTMX or Alpine.js to add it. It seems to me something like this _should_ be possible.

it is possible! I've been playing with Astro and shoelace library downloaded from CDN for a use case like that.

deployed version https://b2b-saaskit.vercel.app/setup source code https://github.com/fogbender/b2b-saaskit/blob/44ae552d6093a9...

Super helpful, taking a look now to see how you worked with Astro and Shoelace. This is very encouraging…!

Shoelace looks great! Thanks for sharing it. Can't wait to give it a whirl.

Disagree -- tailwind is likely the fastest way to get a barely-passable design. (Certainly faster than using an external component library then realizing ones you need are only available under the paid, "premium" collection).

And to say that design "just doesn't matter" while you're in fundraising mode, i think is also incorrect. You don't need perfect design, but it has to look pretty decent. It's in people's nature to be turned off by ugly/obsolete looking web pages.

OpenProps is on par with the developer experience of Tailwind in my opinion. The choice between the two more comes down to preference, class names as inline styles or a collection of Css variables

> 100% agree, I've always been impressed by what the projects and courses Kent puts out.

this ^^ was you, right? pardon me if I don't hold your opinion in high regard

Care to explain? There's not really much here for me to go on.

I believe a framework like Bootstrap might be a faster approach at the beginning (honestly, it's a fair approach for the whole lifecycle of a project). You get all the building blocks to get a consistent UI working fairly quick with little to no CSS knowledge. Some times removing the unnecessary flexibility may be a boost to get things out there.

But, at the end of day, the best option will be the one you're most comfortable with.

Also, Bootstrap gives you plenty of copy-and-paste ready examples, including accessibility enhancements. Accessibility can be an after-thought to not just devs, but many designers, but Bootstrap helps put it right up front for the lazy developer.

Anecdotally, I've sometimes seen better quality websites for a lot of the little "polish" things like accessibility (which isn't really "polish", is it?) from the laziest "just use Bootstrap" developers than from the most hardworking Tailwind developer+designer combos.

Tailwind exists at a different part of the... stack. Tailwind is not a component library, it's a styling language as an alternative to CSS.

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