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Comment by dontlikeyoueith | Hacker News Reader

> generally consider tailwind to be a minimal local maximum

I feel like I've been nerd sniped trying to figure out what you mean by this.

It took a sec but I parsed "a minimal local maximum" as "from the set of all local maximums, this local maximum is near the bottom." Thus it is a local maximum, so any small change produces a worse result, but it is one of the worst local maximums you could have found.

> Thus it is a local maximum, so any small change produces a worse result

I have ML engineer brain, so to me any small change from a local maximum is an IMPROVEMENT (because we try to minimize loss functions).

Your reading makes more sense.

It's the lowest hill in the range of CSS frameworks, it's not reaching the heights of proper semantic CSS, but the valleys of haphazard, unsystematic style attributes are an even lower point.

What do you mean by "proper" and "semantic?" The CSS spec never took much of an opinion on how classes should be organized or mapped to elements in the DOM. It's a technical standard. The way people used to write high-abstraction CSS was completely a cultural convention that, in hindsight, overstayed its welcome.

Heh, fair, not a super clear phrase. What I’m trying to evoke is that tailwind has a few merits that do produce a local elevation on a few points of front end dev experience… but not much (and for some the tradeoffs cancel it out) and that more is possible.

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