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