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I'm not sure I fully agree with your view on what tailwind is and why it is growing.

In my opinion, tailwind is gaining some popularity because some people find it faster and easier to use than writing traditional CSS files.

I realise it also has some downsides, and seeing all those class names in the html is particularly ugly, but if the people using it got their project out faster, then surely there is a place for it?

Technology choices, and life's choices in general are like a spectrogram of different wavelengths with positive and negative values... Like "this will help you today, but bite you in the rear tomorrow", or "this will help you tomorrow, but be annoying today". And it also varies by different conditional developments, if this happens, if that happens, can you implement a change, or the solution is "write-only" and so on.

One of the tests of intelligence is can you defer immediate gratification, so you can reap higher rewards in time that compound themselves, or you lack impulse control and therefore you essentially have the model behavior of a house fly.

This incessant focus on "here, now, me" that I see glorified, which doesn't consider at all anything outside a point in time and space that demands the impulse to be immediately satisfied... is not a good direction for tech, or for society at all. It's like choosing porn over a family.

Obviously, I'm describing a broader problem here, not just some CSS tool, but Tailwind and many of the "frameworks" we see pushed in the industry do also embody this philosophy, quite clearly. Many things do these days. Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end? Are your projects so worthless, that you need to ship them today and then leave hell to yourself and others few months down the line? Not to mention that all the claims Tailwind is "faster", somehow, are written in weasel language to hide the fact Tailwind adds tangible, often significant lag and load to people's devices when they use your site. Does this matter?

Of course, a fancy experiment is all good. You won't see me writing long posts about how Brainfuck is the end of humanity. But Tailwind has a good size community that actually believes their approach is superior, they're on a mission from God, and it's become viral, dragging in more and more people in, and influencing other projects into the same stupidity. What else does it mean to write a post called "Why Tailwind won". Won what? Was there a war going on? Won over what? Bootstrap? Bootstrap is a framework. Won over CSS? It runs on CSS, it's not an "alternative to" CSS, although it sure makes it impossible to use most of the benefits of CSS in a sane way. Yay, what a win.

If Brainfuck was totally serious, and you saw your company is starting to write critical projects in Brainfuck, wouldn't that give you a serious pause?

What makes you think tailwind would be hell in the future though? It's just a load of classes on html elements. Maintenance is pretty easy.

I do agree with you on the headline though, of course tailwind hasn't won anything!

First, the site uses some weasel language to speak about how much they're "focused on performance" in such a way as you think Tailwind is literally faster than doing normal CSS. It's not. It's a heavy approach and while you can always find edge cases to the contrary, in general it leads to pages that add lag and load to people's devices.

If you have a very simple page this doesn't matter, but as your site/business grows, it does.

Second, Tailwind obviously promotes a ton of repetition in the same way that using presentational attributes from the 90s and style="" does. This not only adds, again, burden to the CSS engine and DOM, but this "ease of copy pasting" that the author boasts about in the linked blog means you can easily end up with tons of subtle or not so subtle inconsistencies in your site's code and components, UI.

Copy pasting is easy. But there's a reason why we define classes, functions, modules, and reuse them, instead of copy-pasting our code everywhere. Copy pasting is a strategy for a quick start and a very short journey as you paste more and more variations of what you're trying to do around your site. Now change them all consistently. Oh shit, I guess... find/replace + regex? This works sometimes, but it's a deeply unserious approach to change management in an application/site at scale, and means your velocity and quality both will suffer.

I'm aware of the way to define custom classes as sort of "components" in Tailwind, but at this point... you're literally using Tailwind as you would CSS, but with a ton of indirection, gibberish, and very very unclear precedence/specificity rules.

You will also get many people complaining about compilation speed for larger sites. A problem that is quite bizarre to have for styling with a language that doesn't require compilation when you use it in a sane way (and SASS etc. are extremely fast and don't have this problem, there's even a Rust SASS parser I believe, that's even faster).

Tailwind also severely restricts your precision and expression. I probably don't have to explain the limitations of inline styles when those styles have to change from user interaction, or for different devices, and container size and so on. Tailwind makes all this extremely bizarre, if it addresses it at all. In "plain" CSS (and other more reasonable tools like SASS), it's trivial.

I would donate more upvotes to this multi-part tirade if I could.

I haven't used Tailwind, or any other CSS framework, because I have never understood why I would want to, having attended a talk about a similar system back in the day where styles were turned into weirdly specific CSS classes, as if they were trying to reinvent font tags. The way you've described it is pretty much what I would expect from such a thing.

And yet it's oddly familiar, because all of the 'MVC' frameworks that I've been forced to use and hated[1] seemed to come from the same design philosophy: Throw a bunch of shit code together, then build a cult around it so that people use it whether it makes any sense or not. Laravel's a great example of this because if you search the web for it you'll mostly get results saying that it's "elegant" and "for web artisans", but none of them can explain why it's better than...not using it. They even have some class in there called "Illuminate", which is ironically not very illuminating w.r.t. what the heck it is or does. As if writing code that actually makes any damn sense is everyone's biggest fear and the solution is to acquire a magic wand from one of the Framework Gods that does away with pesky old logic and predictability.

"What do you want to do, write everything from scratch?", your coworkers will say, as if we were making computer programs by banging rocks together before Laravel/Rails/Spring/Django/etc came along, and give you a blank stare if you try to explain that writing regular old well-factored OO/functional code is a thing you can do and that slathering culty frameworky paste all over everything doesn't make life any better or your programs any faster, even if said goo has "good documentation", by which they mean lots of activity on Stack Overflow because nobody can figure out how they're supposed to do anything without copy-pasting from some example that mysteriously worked for somebody one time.

[1] I don't remember much about the ones I didn't hate, because they did very little and stayed out of the way.

Hahaha - I wonder if Tailwind is starting to take over from frameworks v no-framework as the best way to start a huge fiery debate on HN!

Tailwind is extremely polarizing, yes like frameworks, and yes like politics. This polarization tends to happen on the two sides of "reality distortion fields", where someone's propaganda on one side, doesn't match propaganda on the other side. It's like Russians believing the West is the worst, and Putin is there to save them from The Gays. Or the West casually ignoring their impact on Russia with NATO advancing to the doorstep of an old, imperialistic, paranoid regime. What are they supposed to think?

But describing this as merely "both sides have equal merit" is really crude. Because more often than not, one side tends to be closer to the truth. Maybe Tailwind has some neat ideas. In fact I'm sure it has some neat ideas. Placed carefully somewhere in the calm eye, the dead center of this tornado of bullshit that is Tailwind overall. But then again, we can't ignore the tornado of bullshit.

I suppose it depends if you're trying to build the perfect website, or just want to get something launched fast.

I usually build websites to solve a problem, or to try out a business idea. The structure of the HTML and whether I am using a web framework are not important to me.

The main thing is, can I get this finished and looking great in a few days.

I hear this argument a lot, on the surface it makes sense. We all want to ship fast. Right?

But then... I try to imagine how Tailwind allows you to style your site in a few days, but it'd take you, the same person, what... weeks, to style it with CSS? It's so ridiculous it's making me laugh out loud just imagining this somehow. As if CSS is this thing for rocket engineers that is way beyond a common man's grasp?

Seriously, how LOW is the bar, I don't get it? When is something as easy and basic as CSS... just easy enough? "property: value;" Or have you never given CSS a chance, and you were heavily gaslit by Tailwind marketing into thinking CSS is a scary monster and here comes the savior Tailwind? I can accept the latter, but this is also the reason why I find these fad frameworks such a harmful phenomenon. But I can't fathom the former.

Yes I agree. But people always move towards the tools that help them go a little faster.

Reading the bloated HTML when using Tailwind is less painful than dealing with all the cascading crap of CSS.

CSS cascades whether you use Tailwind or not.

This isn't correct. Tailwind removes all the cascading. And it is liberating.

All cascading styles are removed, so if you pull in a component you have already built on your site, it will be styled identically in the new location too.

"Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end?"

You're on hacker news, which is pretty heavily focused on startups. Startups usually have a limited runway, wherein if they don't deliver they cease to exist. That seems like a pretty reason to ship faster?

Comparing "choose a framework that saves developer time and energy" to "choose porn over your family" seems a bit much.

> So as the bubble grows, you start also seeing jobs requiring "10 years of Tailwind experience" more and more often, the projects you rely on are starting to switch to Tailwind, and now you have to use Tailwind, like it or not, because everything is glued to Tailwind. If the bubble keeps growing, then we also see a myriad of "like Tailwind but for JavaScript", "like Tailwind, but for SQL", "like Tailwind, but for web services" and there's no end to how far it can go, because bubbles, driven by the aligned wide-eyed stupidity of millions of delusional people can grow to wrap around the entire industry, before they pop.

Ah, just like React!

Kinda.

If React dies I'll be sad. While most of React is BS, the "ReactDOM" component, the Virtual DOM model that is applied to the real DOM by "delta" diff, is a solid concept that deserved to live. Unfortunately we do tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater, when we decide something is uncool.

We're a very stupid species.

When has anything in tech ever actually died? I guess there will be people building sites in React forever. Haha

Does anyone, anywhere still use Coffeescript?

Hahaha. Ok yes, there definitely are also some things that die.

First time: someone's opinion actually changed as a result of a brief Internet argument.

I think that rely on several other fact.

- Javascript evolved, so you no longer need some crazy long template to support simple sentence like class extends - TypesScript appears, and also benefit the js eco system with d.ts files. And it even become coffeescript's short coming - Editor evolved, the editing experience is far better than before. The time typing long keywords can mostly compensated by auto-complete

But what will be the pain point that react can't resolve, other framework can and out weight any other benefits? I don't see that as for now

> Tailwind projects read like the wall writings of a mad man

My dear pot, you should meet my friend Kettle.

Really, this is a lot of text that sums up your personal preferences as to why you don't like Tailwind. Nothing concretely objective here. And, by the way, I agree with some of it! But you're also ignoring Tailwind is used by massive, engineer-first companies (such as Stripe), and the engineers in question actually like working with Tailwind. This idea that people who use Tailwind hate it is obvious nonsense, and it's always a significant tell that someone hasn't really produced anything with it when they start claiming that about others.

Stripe is not a dude, it's a company of many people with different skills in different areas. I also often wonder how OpenAI has a team that can create the world's top AI model currently, and yet their front-end chat app and plugin model has basic injections, usability issues, accidental user information disclosures and other novice bugs, but there you go. I guess it's possible to have a company skilled in something and stupid in another.

I think my critique was sufficiently detailed, but if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code.

> if you like Tailwind's approach you may enjoy it coming to your language of choice, where you can code by writing very long variable names in a highly specific way, which are then read by reflection and interpreted as code.

No need for Tailwind; in enterprisey Java land we already have Hibernate and Spring Boot for those who like long, magical method names. And if you want an extra layer of obfuscation, drop Lombok in there.

> It is good because Tailwind actively fights the engineering choices behind the web platform, it doesn't understand them, it doesn't build on top of them in synergy and alignment, but it counteracts and nullifies them with religious fervor and zeal.

Are there any CSS frameworks that are the opposite of this?

Tailwind may be madness, but it’s manageable and maintainable madness.

The alternative is not sanity, but simply unmaintainable madness.