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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

CTRL+u gives a nice example of the syntax.

For example to make a box with rounded corners and a top and bottom section, all you need is this intuitive one-liner:

<div class="mt-5 mb-8 first:mt-0 last:mb-0 relative overflow-hidden rounded-2xl"><div class="pt-2 bg-slate-800 shadow-lg group"><div class="flex text-slate-400 text-xs leading-6"><div class="flex-none text-sky-300 border-t border-b border-t-transparent border-b-sky-300 px-4 py-1 flex items-center">app.css</div><div class="flex-auto flex items-center bg-slate-700/50 border border-slate-500/30 rounded-tl"></div></div><div class="children:my-0 children:!shadow-none children:bg-transparent"><pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@import</span> <span class="token string">"tailwindcss"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span></span></code></pre></div></div><div class="pointer-events-none absolute inset-0 rounded-2xl dark:ring-1 dark:ring-white/10 dark:ring-inset" aria-hidden="true"></div></div>

View on HN

A box with rounded corners and a top and bottom section:

  <div class="bg-white rounded-2xl">
    <div class="bg-blue-500">Top Section</div>
    <div>Bottom Section</div>
  </div>

A few issues here:

1. When you're working with this code, it's far easier to read with proper formatting and syntax highlighting. I know people take issue with the verbosity of tailwind, but anything will look awful if you remove formatting.

2. This is lacking an equivalent non-tailwind approach. If you can share the equivalent vanilla HTML/CSS (or pick your preferred framework), and then paste it here as an unformatted text blob, this might be a bit more fair.

3. I don't think it's fair to describe this as just a "box with rounded corners and a top and bottom section". That can be done with tailwind with less complexity/syntax, if that's truly all you want.

Here is an example from their own website. It's for a very simple interface. Do you think this looks maintainable?

    <main class="py-6 px-4 sm:p-6 md:py-10 md:px-8">
      <div class="max-w-4xl mx-auto grid grid-cols-1 lg:max-w-5xl lg:gap-x-20 lg:grid-cols-2">
        <div class="relative p-3 col-start-1 row-start-1 flex flex-col-reverse rounded-lg bg-gradient-to-t from-black/75 via-black/0 sm:bg-none sm:row-start-2 sm:p-0 lg:row-start-1">
          <h1 class="mt-1 text-lg font-semibold text-white sm:text-slate-900 md:text-2xl dark:sm:text-white">Beach House in Collingwood</h1>
          <p class="text-sm leading-4 font-medium text-white sm:text-slate-500 dark:sm:text-slate-400">Entire house</p>
        </div>
        <div class="grid gap-4 col-start-1 col-end-3 row-start-1 sm:mb-6 sm:grid-cols-4 lg:gap-6 lg:col-start-2 lg:row-end-6 lg:row-span-6 lg:mb-0">
          <img src="/beach-house.jpg" alt="" class="w-full h-60 object-cover rounded-lg sm:h-52 sm:col-span-2 lg:col-span-full" loading="lazy">
          <img src="/beach-house-interior-1.jpg" alt="" class="hidden w-full h-52 object-cover rounded-lg sm:block sm:col-span-2 md:col-span-1 lg:row-start-2 lg:col-span-2 lg:h-32" loading="lazy">
          <img src="/beach-house-interior-2.jpg" alt="" class="hidden w-full h-52 object-cover rounded-lg md:block lg:row-start-2 lg:col-span-2 lg:h-32" loading="lazy">
        </div>
        <dl class="mt-4 text-xs font-medium flex items-center row-start-2 sm:mt-1 sm:row-start-3 md:mt-2.5 lg:row-start-2">
          <dt class="sr-only">Reviews</dt>
          <dd class="text-indigo-600 flex items-center dark:text-indigo-400">
            <svg width="24" height="24" fill="none" aria-hidden="true" class="mr-1 stroke-current dark:stroke-indigo-500">
              <path d="m12 5 2 5h5l-4 4 2.103 5L12 16l-5.103 3L9 14l-4-4h5l2-5Z"  stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" />
            </svg>
            <span>4.89 <span class="text-slate-400 font-normal">(128)</span></span>
          </dd>
          <dt class="sr-only">Location</dt>
          <dd class="flex items-center">
            <svg width="2" height="2" aria-hidden="true" fill="currentColor" class="mx-3 text-slate-300">
              <circle cx="1" cy="1" r="1" />
            </svg>
            <svg width="24" height="24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="mr-1 text-slate-400 dark:text-slate-500" aria-hidden="true">
              <path d="M18 11.034C18 14.897 12 19 12 19s-6-4.103-6-7.966C6 7.655 8.819 5 12 5s6 2.655 6 6.034Z" />
              <path d="M14 11a2 2 0 1 1-4 0 2 2 0 0 1 4 0Z" />
            </svg>
            Collingwood, Ontario
          </dd>
        </dl>
        <div class="mt-4 col-start-1 row-start-3 self-center sm:mt-0 sm:col-start-2 sm:row-start-2 sm:row-span-2 lg:mt-6 lg:col-start-1 lg:row-start-3 lg:row-end-4">
          <button type="button" class="bg-indigo-600 text-white text-sm leading-6 font-medium py-2 px-3 rounded-lg">Check availability</button>
        </div>
        <p class="mt-4 text-sm leading-6 col-start-1 sm:col-span-2 lg:mt-6 lg:row-start-4 lg:col-span-1 dark:text-slate-400">
          This sunny and spacious room is for those traveling light and looking for a comfy and cosy place to lay their head for a night or two. This beach house sits in a vibrant neighborhood littered with cafes, pubs, restaurants and supermarkets and is close to all the major attractions such as Edinburgh Castle and Arthur's Seat.
        </p>
      </div>
    </main>

It's not meant to be maintained. If you want to make changes, start over.

/s?

> Do you think this looks maintainable?

I guess that depends. Compared to what?

Again, show me the equivalent widget implemented some other way and we can have a useful discussion.

Having spent a little time experimenting with tailwind for prototypes in the past, I can understand what that snippet is doing pretty easily. Having spent a lot more time writing vanilla HTML/CSS, I can immediately imagine all of the ways the vanilla version would be a nightmare, or at least take far longer to build “properly”.

Tailwind is a fascinating project because it seems to either make sense to people or it seems to deeply offend them. For whatever reason, I’m able to build things with tailwind after just a few hours of use that I could never accomplish from scratch (or with some popular CSS frameworks for that matter) after years of hacking on HTML/CSS.

15 minutes getting familiar with the class naming conventions makes all of this seem far less scary.

And it’s worth considering the variety of use cases a framework like this is useful for. Maintainability means very different things depending on context, team, and what kind of thing you’re building.

Here's an excerpt from YouTubes Javascript. Do you think this looks maintainable?

    Z3 = function(a) { a = g.fb(a); delete X3[a]; g.md(X3) && Y3 && Y3.stop() },

...or maybe the build-output isn't a great indicator for maintainability. If you write your html directly like you posted above, it won't be maintainable regardless of how you structure your css.

What I posted isn’t build output, it’s the example they give on the homepage of their website.

That's super funny that even a defender of tailwind mistook source code for build output.

Okay, if that's how they're selling Tailwind, I can understand why some developers are confused.

I assume they do it because they don't want to promote a specific framework on their homepage.

Go to the section "Worried about duplication? Don’t be." Does the code there look more maintainable to you? Because that's how you should be writing any moderately complex html anyways.

Yes. Much more than doing this via a number of detached and separate CSS classes defined in different files, with colliding rules and all the fun that goes with this. Or better yet, inventing enough small composable utility functions to work around these issues until you might have well have used tailwind.

When you say “does this look maintainable”, what you should be saying is “does this look maintainable compared to this other thing”.

I’d love to make a simple html skeleton and basic css rules to show a comparison but I don’t have the time.

You’d need to build a site with multiple pages, with multiple developers and lots of concurrent changes.

Then you’d realise why people don’t use raw CSS

I use raw CSS. I just scope it to the component level and I've never had a problem on any of the projects I've worked on. I do tend to avoid absolutely massive projects but I've worked on plenty of fairly big codebases and there is no problem as long as the CSS is scoped well using CSS modules. Inline styles are awful for maintainability and readability of the html, which is an important semantic description of your content.

> but I don’t have the time

And this, to me, is why Tailwind is so popular and why I find it valuable. Despite looking a bit verbose at first, it’s pretty easy to pull together some pretty advanced pages without having to invest much time at all.

And the time saved only increases with more proficiency/familiarity with the available classes.

Things very quickly “just work”, and the conventions apply pretty uniformly.

It would probably take me 20 minutes or so, and would be very maintainable and not make anyone's eyes bleed. I'm not willing to put that 20 mins in to prove my point, but I am certain that the unmaintainable code vomit which they have as an example on their website took much longer than that.

I can't wait to see what happens in 5 years when all of this unmaintainable mess still needs maintaining. I suspect it'll be just as fun as maintaining old bootstrap or any other short-lived frameworks of yester years.

Inline styles and abusing divs. I suspect the next hotness will be nested tables again.

Right? I can't believe this is being so overwhelmingly used all of a sudden.

I host a secret dislike for it but was really turned off by you including in-lined SVG files, shifted me more towards "maybe it isn't bad relative to peers"

That's what they have on their homepage, should I have removed it? Does this look any more maintainable?

    <main class="py-6 px-4 sm:p-6 md:py-10 md:px-8">
      <div class="max-w-4xl mx-auto grid grid-cols-1 lg:max-w-5xl lg:gap-x-20 lg:grid-cols-2">
        <div class="relative p-3 col-start-1 row-start-1 flex flex-col-reverse rounded-lg bg-gradient-to-t from-black/75 via-black/0 sm:bg-none sm:row-start-2 sm:p-0 lg:row-start-1">
          <h1 class="mt-1 text-lg font-semibold text-white sm:text-slate-900 md:text-2xl dark:sm:text-white">Beach House in Collingwood</h1>
          <p class="text-sm leading-4 font-medium text-white sm:text-slate-500 dark:sm:text-slate-400">Entire house</p>
        </div>
        <div class="grid gap-4 col-start-1 col-end-3 row-start-1 sm:mb-6 sm:grid-cols-4 lg:gap-6 lg:col-start-2 lg:row-end-6 lg:row-span-6 lg:mb-0">
          <img src="/beach-house.jpg" alt="" class="w-full h-60 object-cover rounded-lg sm:h-52 sm:col-span-2 lg:col-span-full" loading="lazy">
          <img src="/beach-house-interior-1.jpg" alt="" class="hidden w-full h-52 object-cover rounded-lg sm:block sm:col-span-2 md:col-span-1 lg:row-start-2 lg:col-span-2 lg:h-32" loading="lazy">
          <img src="/beach-house-interior-2.jpg" alt="" class="hidden w-full h-52 object-cover rounded-lg md:block lg:row-start-2 lg:col-span-2 lg:h-32" loading="lazy">
        </div>
        <dl class="mt-4 text-xs font-medium flex items-center row-start-2 sm:mt-1 sm:row-start-3 md:mt-2.5 lg:row-start-2">
          <dt class="sr-only">Reviews</dt>
          <dd class="text-indigo-600 flex items-center dark:text-indigo-400">
            <SVG GOES HERE>
            <span>4.89 <span class="text-slate-400 font-normal">(128)</span></span>
          </dd>
          <dt class="sr-only">Location</dt>
          <dd class="flex items-center">
            <SVG GOES HERE>
            Collingwood, Ontario
          </dd>
        </dl>
        <div class="mt-4 col-start-1 row-start-3 self-center sm:mt-0 sm:col-start-2 sm:row-start-2 sm:row-span-2 lg:mt-6 lg:col-start-1 lg:row-start-3 lg:row-end-4">
          <button type="button" class="bg-indigo-600 text-white text-sm leading-6 font-medium py-2 px-3 rounded-lg">Check availability</button>
        </div>
        <p class="mt-4 text-sm leading-6 col-start-1 sm:col-span-2 lg:mt-6 lg:row-start-4 lg:col-span-1 dark:text-slate-400">
          This sunny and spacious room is for those traveling light and looking for a comfy and cosy place to lay their head for a night or two. This beach house sits in a vibrant neighborhood littered with cafes, pubs, restaurants and supermarkets and is close to all the major attractions such as Edinburgh Castle and Arthur's Seat.
        </p>
      </div>
    </main>

This is only 20 max CSS classes. Yah, you haven't been a REAL tailwind maintainer if you haven't worked on a website that uses 50+ CSS classes for elements - some with minor variants! I had to do so and deeply regret the experience.

It was like extreme eye exercise with eyeballs popping out at the end of the work day.

Tailwind CSS is a write-only CSS cult at the moment. Cults take some time to die. After a decade, one will have dozens of "Why I quit using Tailwind" posts on HN. Back to vanilla CSS!

Now, if one wants to use a sane implementation of Atomic CSS, look at: https://open-props.style/. Jeez that is so much more readable and maintainable.

I'll take this over grepping hundreds CSS files trying to find that one specific class and hoping it's not used anywhere else anyday of the week.

Can you not keep your files in some sort of order?

On my pet projects? Absolutely.

On work projects with 5 years of contributions wrote by 50+ collaborators and close deadlines? Hardly think so.

If you have to use grep to find a CSS class, you're doing it very wrong. Not having any discipline or organizational skills leads to needing grep to find CSS, it is not something inherent to CSS itself.

In my front end, for example, I have registration-page.jsx and registration-page.less, and there is really zero mystery where the styles are for the registration-page. It uses components like password-input.jsx, and guess what? the CSS for that is in password-input.less. There's no grepping, there's no difficulty finding the classes that are specified. Everything is very orderly and easy to find.

Even if your styles aren't colocated you can use sourcemapping alongside established patterns on how to structure out your scss/less. Just inspect the element and click on the filename next to your selector and it opens in your editor.

And what about projects that don’t exist in a paradigm where css can be collocated with templates/components? Legacy projects? Large contributor teams?

grep -R .class-name ./assets/css/wherever

Or use your IDE's project search? In vscode you can just ctrl-click on the class and it should find it?

IT IS NOT DIFFICULT

Until you discover that one feature in production that is built with dynamically concatenated class names and the SCSS file is deeply nested to hell and back so your search didn’t find `card__${cardType}__inner—-${userPrefColor}-background`

Ask me how I know!

That doesn't sound like something any tooling should be supporting.

I've done that before, and everyone who does regrets it. It should be a linting error, not something we need to re-write searching to support.

What do you honestly expect someone to reply to this comment?

Yes, and?

Developers tend to do bad things sometimes. It happens. That’s the reality.

Yes. The best explanation of Tailwind is when Adam describes it as “an API for your design system.”

The biggest problem with CSS when trying to maintain a design system is the same problems you run into any time you use inheritance in programming.

Inheritance has its place, but making your CSS composable the way Tailwind does makes it practical to actually adhere to a design system.

If you’re more worried about the purity of your HTML, then Tailwind is not for you.

Sourcemaps and the browser inspector will tell you exactly where the styling for that element is coming from

Why use a bad faith interpretation of what Tailwind is? You know this isn't what it looks like when you are developing

yeah it just looks like that to everyone else, so you're avoiding the pain yourself while inflicting it upon anyone interested in inspecting the compiled output

Who would be interested in inspecting the compiled code? Genuine question.

I'm so glad this wasn't the prevailing opinion when they first came up with the web. "Inspect source" is how I learned how to build my first website in the newly released browser called "Firefox 1.0".

It wasn’t an opinion, but I think you gave me the answer anyway, which seems to be “students learning CSS”. I never learned CSS like this, so I wouldn't think of it.

I started learning CSS only about 6 years ago. So I had Stack Overflow and MDN web docs for it.

The answer, as with all code, is "you, six months from now".

Anything that makes your code less readable is a fail. I understand that people want to treat CSS and HTML as assembly, but that's a leaky metaphor, and only works insofar as you never have to debug an actual webpage.

Every place I've ever seen with tailwind has struggled with front end work, because the end result is so horribly abstracted from the code.

That code posted above is the compiled code in the browser.

The developing code is not unreadable like that one. I think Tailwind is very readable during development. Even if I had only used in side projects.

The meaning of 'compiled' has shifted quite a bit. We used to say transpiled when the output wasn't byte or machine code.

Yes, I know. Tailwind emits this kind of gibberish as a compilation step, which makes it much harder to figure out what's breaking when you're using a browser inspector or something. Which of the 83 different classes is the problem? Good luck!

You have to have a certain level of discipline to write clean CSS, but it really isn't that hard. It shouldn't take a 300-character inline style to make a button, when you can use CSS as intended, and have a class named "button".

I learned how to build websites in the late 90's similarly. Then progressed by reading blogs of other developers who shared their source in their posts.

It made sense back then because it was all we had to learn. Today there's tons of code to learn from both in open source and resources.

Lets get rid of this false dichotomy that the only way to learn is by viewing the source of websites, in the year 2024.

It's because of the mentality that things should be open and inspectable that we have things like browser devtools (thanks Firebug!), that is something we still use today to learn and troubleshoot. Sometimes it makes it harder when people use various compile-to-js/css languages, but also sometimes people ship their sourcemaps and again we can learn from examples. Or we try to reverse-engineer it, which is another valuable skill.

I didn't mean to say this is the only way of learning, but I stand firm on that it's still a great way to learn, to look at how cool stuff was done when you come across it on real websites, not just from blog posts describing something. In addition to reading fundamentals, practicing small projects and so on, of course.

I think we've lost some of the coolness of the old web from this mentality. We turned website source code from a txt to a pdf.

It's how I learned web development

I'm not a fan of tailwind, but this isn't what I optimise for when building websites.

Besides, I suspect (but not know, because my experience with tailwind is very minimal) that that output is readable and understandable by those experienced and developing with tailwind. On top of all the other affordances modern dev tools gives to understand styling on elements (esp. the computed pane)

When you build websites you are creating code for others to read as much as you're creating an "app" or document.

It's the very essence of what's good and special about the web. If the companies that are trying to do away with this succeed, we will have lost something important.

The web is and should remain de facto open source.

> When you build websites you are creating code for others to read as much as you're creating an "app" or document.

I couldn't disagree any more with this. When the overwhelming majority of your users would never actually be impacted by this, I believe you have more of a responsibility to the bulk of your users, rather than a fraction of a percentage.

I say this as an open-source developer, who ships source maps to production. I would much rather us increase our development veloticity and build higher quality products rather than satisfy one nerd who might want to occasionally view source.

Bloat is detrimental to the bulk of your users.

> When you build websites you are creating code for others to read as much as you're creating an "app" or document.

That's an approach people are certainly welcome to take, and I'm glad that some people do, but I disagree that this is what the act of building a website entails.

This feels a bit like romanticizing the early days of the web, when the primary form of learning involved reading other people's source code. The depth and breadth of ways to learn in 2024 looks nothing like those early days.

If I choose to build something to solve a particular need or to communicate something I care about, it's my choice as to how I do that.

> It's the very essence of what's good and special about the web.

The very essence of what's good and special about the web is the diversity of solutions, the myriad of entry points to becoming a web developer, the existence of tools ranging from vanilla HTML/CSS all the way up to complex frameworks like Tailwind, and your freedom to pick your path.

Tailwind's existence does not threaten the layers underneath it.

I work on a "white label" site that gets customized by an army of css coders/designers. Tailwind seems like it would be a total non-starter for us.

Your use case is fairly specific. Tailwind is a tool, if it doesn't make sense to you and your use case, it's okay to not use it. That said, it's not okay to misrepresent what Tailwind actually is like the original commenter did.

For fun I tried to make an equivalently bad-faith two-liner with vanilla HTML+CSS that preserves the Tailwind behavior:

<div class="custom-box"><div class="header"><div class="tab">app.css</div><div class="header-expand"></div></div><div class="content"><pre><code>@import "tailwindcss";</code></pre></div></div>

.custom-box {margin-top: 1.25rem; margin-bottom: 2rem; position: relative; overflow: hidden; border-radius: 0.5rem;}.custom-box:first-child {margin-top: 0;}.custom-box:last-child {margin-bottom: 0;}.header {padding-top: 0.5rem; background-color: #1E293B; box-shadow: 0 10px 15px -3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), 0 4px 6px -2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05); display: flex; color: #94A3B8; font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 1.5;}.tab {flex: none; color: #0EA5E9; border-top: transparent; border-bottom: 2px solid #0EA5E9; padding: 0.25rem 1rem; display: flex; align-items: center;}.header-expand {flex-grow: 1; background-color: #334155/50; border: 1px solid rgba(156, 163, 175, 0.3); border-radius: 0.375rem 0 0 0;}.content pre, .content code {margin: 0; background: none; box-shadow: none;}@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {.custom-box::after {box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1);}.header {background-color: #334155;}.tab {color: #bfdbfe;}.header-expand {background-color: #475569; border-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2);}}@media (min-width: 640px) {.custom-box {margin-top: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 2.5rem;}.header {padding-top: 0.75rem;}.tab, .header-expand {padding: 0.5rem 1.25rem;}.content pre, .content code {font-size: 0.875rem;}}@media (min-width: 768px) {.custom-box {margin-top: 2rem; margin-bottom: 3rem;}.header {padding-top: 1rem;}.tab, .header-expand {padding: 0.75rem 1.5rem;}.content pre, .content code {font-size: 1rem;}}@media (min-width: 1024px) {.custom-box {margin-top: 2.5rem; margin-bottom: 3.5rem;}.header {padding-top: 1.25rem;}.tab, .header-expand {padding: 1rem 1.75rem;}.content pre, .content code {font-size: 1.125rem;}}@media (min-width: 1280px) {.custom-box {margin-top: 3rem; margin-bottom: 4rem;}.header {padding-top: 1.5rem;}.tab, .header-expand {padding: 1.25rem 2rem;}.content pre, .content code {font-size: 1.25rem;}}@media (min-width: 1536px) {.custom-box {margin-top: 3.5rem; margin-bottom: 4.5rem;}.header {padding-top: 1.75rem;}.tab, .header-expand {padding: 1.5rem 2.25rem;}.content pre, .content code {font-size: 1.375rem;}}.content > * {margin:0; box-shadow: none; background: transparent;}

(this probably an incomplete/buggy/incorrect port of Tailwind behavior)

Oh no! This is unreadable and unmaintainable.

I'll take this version over tailwind anytime. It's one auto-formatting step from being perfectly readable for someone who knows css and styles tell me how it looks like and css classes tells me WHAT IT IS. And information (nearly?) completely missing from tailwind counterpart. I can also easily see what structure the DOM has.

> ...tells me WHAT IT IS.

Tailwind is a styling library, not label system. You want to know what something is? use the id attribute, it's not rocket science

> I can also easily see what structure the DOM has.

Really? Because even in the cherry-picked half-assed example above I can more easily read the DOM structure than whatever this is.

> Tailwind is a styling library, not label system.

So what is it doing in my html tags?

It's not a place for styling since css was invented.

> ... than whatever this is.

Whatever this is? These are 7 html tags and I can see how nested they are in 10 seconds even without autoformatting.

<div class="custom-box"><div class="header"><div class="tab">app.css</div><div class="header-expand"></div></div><div class="content"><pre><code>@import "tailwindcss";</code></pre></div></div>

In tailwind example you need more than 30 seconds to even count them.

What does it look like when developing?

Much prefer reading this and making a change in place, than to go through a bunch of overloaded class names (e.g., 'container') in dozens of .css files just to adjust something like a margin on it.

I don't think this is a very good example, because it's not just "a box with rounded corners and a top and bottom section". It's a fully styled box containing formatted code (leading to a lot of spans and classes for individual chars in this code).

This isn't exactly honest but it's still funny.

When you format that code, it's easily readable.

as opposed to the very intuitive css one liner?

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