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Comment by orangepanda | Hacker News Reader

Tailwind is write only, you’re not supposed to read it or maintain in. Want to change some property? Delete the entire class=“” attribute and start anew. Take that primary button example from the article - no one is claiming that it’s readable, especially when there are hundreds of primary buttons throughout the app, each with a slight variation.

This works great for marketing or landing pages, or other use cases where it’s not you who maintains it after deployment; the next sucker will want to rewrite it all anyway.

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> especially when there are hundreds of primary buttons throughout the app, each with a slight variation.

If you're repeating monstrous groups of styles like the one in the blog post, but with a slight variation for each, then you're tremendously far out in the weeds and almost definitely shouldn't be using tailwind

Tailwind really only works for a component-based framework (like React, Svelte, Solid, etc.), where you define a component representing a button, and give it props to map to the 'minor variation' you want.

That way if you need to support e.g. a new device class, you just add the relevant class names there and don't have to revisit your entire codebase.

This isn't apparent at all when inspecting the source of a site using tailwind, because as far as the rendered markup is concerned, these are getting repeated (and the verbosity of the output is absolutely a fair criticism)

But if you're writing it, and organizing your components in a sensible way, then the problem you mention doesn't exist.

How’s that different than just writing plain CSS?

Tailwind limits the scope of your rewrite problem to the element you want to change. No fears about side effects on other parts of the page.

so if I write into "style", I have all advantages of tailwind?

No. There is no inline style for @media, :hover etc.

Also inline styles are not GPU accelerated like CSS classes are, so there’s a performance difference too

Wouldn’t using @scope or CSS modules resolve that problem?

I modify it all the time so I'm not sure what you're on about.

I have a feeling people hate Tailwind for making CSS accessible to the masses.

Totally agree, it's mostly gatekeeping at this point.

This is just demonstrably not true.

Agreed. I read and maintain tailwind every day. Rewriting it regularly would be highly unproductive.

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