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Comment by andrewfromx | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Enron “oh you just don’t get it” line. Now they were committing fraud not css but when I look at that “mess” of classes the author published that was my first thought. He just doesn’t get this revolution tailwind has started. That mess is actually MORE maintainable than clever classes that do more than one thing.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/13020-enron-the-smartest-gu...

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HTML and CSS are indeed a hot mess in some respects.

However, Tailwind is definitely not the solution, as it is the same as adding a style attribute to each html tag and writing the style in the html. What is valuable about Tailwind imho is the concept of utility classes, which can be accomplished with vanilla css variables.

i'm very guilty of making entire sites with style="margin: 10px; padding: 10px; etc." every style I want right there inline. Inline styles FTW! I would always say: "I'm just getting it working and some css person can clean this up later."

Now I use tailwind and I've learned their wonderful little syntax for mr-x or py and it does feel a little like inline style days. But I do make this file https://github.com/andrewarrow/settle-down/blob/main/assets/... with some stuff so I can say like "btn-main" over and over.

Yep, I have ended up doing the same with Tailwind, because in the end you end up with unmanageable inline styles.

I would recommend you to try Open Props [0], which you can use with Tailwind CSS, and see how what we all really crave is a good utility class system.

[0] https://github.com/argyleink/open-props

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