Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

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>Similarly, I haven't seen a pattern where good CSS authors do not like Tailwind.

well I haven't used Tailwind but from the examples I've seen I would hate it, and from what I can see I would hate it for the same reason that I hate all CSS abstractions I've worked with - because they limit what I can do with CSS in the interest of making it easier for other people who are not that good with CSS to get their work done OR it will require me to do things in a particular way when I believe I know a far better way of doing them.

Now I'm not arguing I am a good CSS author, I do lack some things (like a good feel for design imperfections so I don't notice when something is off) but I am saying I am generally familiar with this behavior in devs regarding other technologies, if one is sufficiently good with a technology one dislikes restraints placed on usage by some external library.

This is why people always comment "This would be so easy if we weren't using {X} technology on top of our code" because they generally are comfortable using the lower layer that the higher layer is now controlling and preventing them from doing their work in what they see as the best way to do it.

So, all that said, I would expect that if Good CSS authors were forced to use Tailwind they would not like it. The assertion to the contrary is extremely surprising and I just don't believe it without some extremely surprising proof to back it up.

> well I haven't used Tailwind but from the examples I've seen I would hate it, and from what I can see I would hate it for the same reason that I hate all CSS abstractions I've worked with - because they limit what I can do with CSS in the interest of making it easier for other people who are not that good with CSS to get their work done OR it will require me to do things in a particular way when I believe I know a far better way of doing them.

Tailwind explicitly doesn't do this. You can do pretty much everything you'd do with normal CSS. There are a couple of edge cases where you have to add configuration (e.g. if you want specific media queries), but Tailwind doesn't limit you in any way.

I also support the assertion that good CSS authors like Tailwind.

There are a few important limitations, Tailwind can't fully support logical properties for example because `mb-8` could mean margin bottom or block. Any use case that requires styling one element based on another gets a bit hairy too.

Both of these can be technically worked around. Config may be able to disable existing margin/padding classes and replace them with a custom set, and the groups feature helps especially for simple cases of referencing other elements.

In my experience though, as soon as config is meaningful modified or you elan on the more obscure features for groups, pseudo selectors, etc. the learning curve has just been moved from the dev who doesn't know CSS to the dev who doesn't know Tailwind.

that is also a thing, when I look at tailwind, having spent my time learning CSS why would I want to learn another syntax to help me do what I can already do, and probably do better.

Thank you for the correction!

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