Comment by weo3dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weo3dev | Hacker News Reader

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Except when using Tailwind, you're learning Tailwind nomenclature and syntax and approach - which really isn't modern CSS, at all.

Today's CSS - if anyone would take the time to actually learn it as they do JavaScript - doesn't need something like Tailwind to make it powerful, scalable and manageable.

I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise.

I don't understand the statement "no one is going back to writing plain CSS" because plain CSS today _is complex_. It is a beast. But it is still "plain" CSS. Yes, it has evolved, it has grown, and it meets today's modern needs with excellent results.

CSS nesting is coming up soon: https://caniuse.com/css-nesting That will more than likely allow me to migrate any projects I have with Sass still in play, to remove Sass. One more dependency removed. Done.

So there's really no need for Tailwind if you know how to build with modern CSS - with the one caveat that if a project _already_ has Tailwind in it, it is a bear to work with/alongside.

That to me is the biggest con with Tailwind: it gets in your way when you don't need it.

I write plain CSS today, which is then scoped to components or bundles of interactivity, and all of those point to major, top-level control sheets that help determine the mode (light/dark/high contrast) and the theme. We tweak small changes up high to effect large platform changes throughout, saving time, energy and headache of the hunt/peck exercise.

I do similar things with Tailwind, making global changes by updating a config file instead of a base CSS file. It's not hard and it works well. To be honest, it's not something that really comes up very often. I don't see this as a particular advantage of Tailwind or CSS. I care much more about the day-to-day dev experience.

Prior to using Tailwind I spent about 20 years trying every system you can imagine to manage styles across large websites/apps. I still use the skills I learned when Tailwind doesn't cover an edge case I need. It's fine. Before that I spent about 5 years doing the same with tables and font tags (Adobe Pagemill was awesome). Of all the systems I've used, Tailwind is the easiest to keep neat and tidy. Maybe I'm a terrible dev and other people find CSS really easy to manage, but having spent two decades talking about it with other frontend engineers I'm reasonably certain that's not a common skill. Tailwind makes life much easier for most people.

One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit.

The cascade is where the value of CSS comes from! It’s an incredibly powerful concept.

I use and love the Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) approach and write a fraction of the CSS code I used to.

Having a few utility classes, using variables for project-specific colors, breakpoints, spacing, using fluid typography, grid, and flexbox, make writing well-structured minimal CSS code a pleasure.

https://www.xfive.co/blog/itcss-scalable-maintainable-css-ar...

https://utopia.fyi/

One more thing I find baffling is the preference to ignore the cascade… and seeing it as a benefit.

Tailwind styles cascade just like any other CSS rules. No one is ignoring it. The reason it might appear not to is because Tailwind uses layers (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer). Technically it's a polyfill at the moment, but v4 will use the native @layer syntax.

If anything Tailwind is actually better at using the cascade than most plain CSS approaches.

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