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Comment by tylerchilds | Hacker News Reader

I’ll be honest.

I’m a contributor to this.

I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.

My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind

But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.

So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.

I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.

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The shorthand makes inline style more ergonomic, so you can see the wood for the trees, rather than long strings of style attributes in your markup.

Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.

The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.

Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.

Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind

Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

The main problem is the premise of tailwind

Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values

They put all that in one style sheet

Which became the one style sheet on earth

Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps

Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.

>Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.

> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there

It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.

There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.

You mean CSS-in-JS?

CSS modules is the native solution. But yes, compile-time CSS in TypeScript like PandaCSS or Vanilla Extract or StyleX (not run-time like Emotion) are also great alternatives.

No. For example, scoped CSS in Vue, Svelte, or Astro components.

> and nobody knows what is going on there.

For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).

One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening

> I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

You mean custom classes?

I mean stuff like adding `display: block` on the parent and `flex: 1` on a child element. Clearly a copy-pasting leftover because someone or whatnot, but then you're debugging a layout issue and you're wondering "but why is this here"

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