Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

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> i've been writing CSS for ~20 years and am quite capable with it, having used CSS, Less, SASS/SCSS, Stylus, PostCSS etc. the reason i have settled on Tailwind for the last few years is precisely because it enables me to build more robust application styling.

I think herein lies at least part of the problem of the web these days: Most websites don't need to be applications, and are needlessly made to be applications, often even SPAs instead of simply being mostly informational pages, in turn putting different requirements for styling onto the project.

> [...] jumping into codebases with bespoke css frameworks is always more complex and fragile than a tailwind codebase for anything but the most simple sites/apps

There is no need for frameworks. Well structured and scoped CSS can handle it all.

> add to that the ability to have consistent type, color and sizing scales, reduced bundle sizes, consistency for any developer who knows tailwind

What if not that does CSS already offer? I don't see how normal CSS does not already do that. No additional thingamabob needed.

> very robust ecosystem (and thus llms are very familiar with it) and tailwind is a really excellent choice for a lot of teams

Tons of ready-made stylesheets out there to use for teams. What more of an "ecosystem" do I need to style a web page? Why do I need an ecosystem? Is it not rather a tailwind self-induced need?

> Most websites don't need to be applications, and are needlessly made to be applications, often even SPAs instead of simply being mostly informational pages, in turn putting different requirements for styling onto the project.

you read a lot into me choosing "application" instead of using "website". for the record i think tailwind works great for both and it actively using in in a many tens of thousands of LOC web "application" and managing a team using it on a fortune 100 mostly static website that gets millions of views a month.

tailwind works great for both and in fact i'd argue works even better on "static" sites because it's efficient bundles and selector compression over the wire. we don't ship a single byte of css we don't use, thus saving on wasted bandwidth and increasing our SEO/page speeds

> There is no need for frameworks. Well structured and scoped CSS can handle it all.

i love when people are so confident other people don't have valid reasons to use tools. real "junior dev" vibes, my friend

> What if not that does CSS already offer? I don't see how normal CSS does not already do that. No additional thingamabob needed.

how many "bespoke" css projects have you worked on? i've works on MANY. nearly all of them suck to get familiar with and to not risk messing up some weird selector hierarchy you weren't aware of. can it be done well? sure, but it's incredibly rare and often only happens on smaller teams/projects. scaling out bespoke css sites becomes increasingly challenging as you scale in LoC and team size.

on the other hand, give me any tailwind project and i can start contributing immediately

> Tons of ready-made stylesheets out there to use for teams. What more of an "ecosystem" do I need to style a web page? Why do I need an ecosystem? Is it not rather a tailwind self-induced need?

ready-made stylesheets? do you mean like a css/html template?

the ecosystem means IDEs work well with it, there are lots of help resources, llms are trained on them heavily, you can find devs who know how to be productive with it, etc.

you can be very familiar with css but struggle within some bespoke framework with the fact that you can structure css in near infinite ways. tailwind gives you a consistent structure and approach across projects

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