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Comment by omegabravo | Hacker News Reader

Tailwind before tailwind.

It's strange, I never saw the point of it, however I saw the value in tailwind almost straight away.

I think that might be the difference in examples. The tachyon examples always look uninspiring.

Tailwind was great because it made it obvious how the classes connected to the configuration. Tachyons was very much was marketed as a "bootstrap" sort of thing where it wanted you to use their configuration and that's it.

The thing I don't like about tachyons, or many CSS "frameworks", is that it severely uglies-up your markup with long class attributes.

Give me a web dev framework with view encapsulation / scoped styles and you can almost get rid of class attributes in your markup all together, especially if you build a component library that your higher level components can consume.

The ugliness is a feature. Declare HTML components that encapsulate the classes. Then each component is stand-alone WYSIWYG and composes easily with others.

Except you still see the encapsulated classes when you inspect it in production, and often that is where the bugs appear and need to be figured out.

The ridiculous class strings get particularly hilarious when anything beyond basic CSS is used. Want CSS variables? Now it's even less readable!

Reading them is easy, that's one of the main benefits of atomic CSS. WYSIWYG.

Tachyons and Basscss were Tailwind before Tailwind. Both are proof that a good idea (debatable) alone is not a enough to earn the collective mindshare of front-end devs; you need shiny examples, a cool splash page, and a looooot of marketing.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed Basscss more than Tailwind, although I mostly just stick to CSS Modules + CSS variables these days.

Yeah, it's funny how dev-minds who typically insist on being objective, etc. get sucked into the trendy hype of something like Tailwind. Don't get me wrong, the Tailwinds of the world have a place. It's unfortunate those who pick it up insist on hammering screws with it.

Yep, not bashing Tailwind, but this is how it usually goes from my experience:

> Team is doing OK with the current boring tech stack

> Senior Dev who is chronically on Twitter: "Hey guys, we should adopt this new library, React-TailsbyQL-babelfu by so-and-so Node though-leader because it makes this one very specific pattern easier! Look at how slick the docs look!"

> Team: "But we already swapped that part of our stack a year ago, and that one pattern would only help in a few specific parts of the codebase."

> Senior Dev makes argument to Product Manager

> Product Manager agrees because it'll look good to the rest of the company

> We complete migration to new shiny new tool; 30 transient dependencies and 4 config files added

> Senior Dev and Product Manager boast to other teams about the successful migration and cherry-pick LOC reduction in certain modules, omitting the added configs and complexity elsewhere; other Product Managers are impressed

> Meanwhile the app now performs worse; weird bugs creep up because details are now obfuscated by the new library; new devs now have to learn the codebase + the way this library dictates things must be done

> Devs start paying for courses by the author of said library using continuing education funds because the docs for the library are insufficient

> Author of library deprecates library; moves on to new library that does almost the exact same thing, and starts evangelizing it on Twitter

> Senior Dev comes back "Hey guys, check out this new library..."

You can tell I'm not bitter.

That would be all well and good but the problem is the product they're generating continues to be second-rate at best. Their user are still dealing with too much friction. Etc.

I'm going to come up with a trendy library or framework and name it Fool.

"A fool with Fool is still a fool." lol

I saw the value in Tailwind, then switched over to Tachyons when I realized it was just like Tailwind but without the JavaScript build step (and you can actually use the full bundle as-is because it's 14kb gzipped)

Tailwind probably looks better, but I'm primarily using Tachyons for common spacing stuff and if I need better looking colors, I'll copy what Tailwind has or define my own. I can still write CSS, I'm not trying to stuff everything into classes generated by some configuration tool or whatever.

For me it is the opposite, tailwind makes me immediately feel ill, Tachyon looks like fun.

I second this. Tailwind is an awful little tech that will fade away in a few years (already doing so) and will leave behind nothing but a horrendous, unreadable overhead of technical debt.

There was a push to build tutorials for whatever using Tailwinds (Build a blog with Hotwire, or something), those were there fastest tab closes ever performed on my lifetime. Those tutorials are useless, they have so much added nonsense that will not stand the test of time that might as well not exist at all.

Tachyons __is__ fun! I have found it to be better for rapid prototyping than Tailwind. The class names are more intuitive as they seem to line up somewhat with Emmet text-expansion triggers, and it's much faster to throw the single <link> in the header than to set up Tailwind every time. Tachyons has always felt so fast.

It's all about the config system. you can really make tailwind your own.

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