Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibbitz | Hacker News Reader

Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.

View on HN

And for some reason you're describing it as it's a bad thing. I don't care much for tailwind, but bootstrap is still used for intranet applications, and is an excellent pick in that category. Why waste time writing CSS, reimplementing what has been done millions of times before you, when working on an application where function has strict precedence over form? I'd rather listen to users who fill hundreds of forms daily, understand where they struggle, and spend effort on optimizing their workflow than on pointless eye candy.

(In my experience, it's never been "this doesn't look as good as the latest version of Discord", or whatever.)

Muzak isn't what most people choose to listen to. I'm not bemoaning the use/existence of the tool, I'm bemoaning what it did to the internet and taste making. We accept boring competence in web design like we accept weird outlet placement in our homes. The signal it sends is that it doesn't matter and as a result many in this thread (and web users in general) believe it. We've been bemoaning the death of the internet lately. AI gets a lot of displaced credit for this, but the Internet died because we stopped bringing creativity. Not just in look and feel, but in content, business ideas etc. In many cases we let walled gardens limit our ability to be creative for convenience (Facebook pages vs VPS hosting for example). The internet stopped being for consumers and started being for businesses. Developers get easy frameworks/platforms so that businesses get a low price point and the customer gets what they get (as though this wasn't to serve them to begin with). If they pay for it, it must be good, right? Why do something new?

I like predictable UI even if it's a little "boring" because given the choice between utility and style, I'll choose utility every time. It is possible to make stylish things that also have very high utility, but it's a lot harder than favoring one, and I will always favor utility.

Take the author's example in this article - he calls out two things more than anything - a single sentence "pitchy" description of the product, and plan cards that look and feel extremely samey from site to site. I'd argue that both of these "downsides" are an upside for me as a consumer:

- Having a one sentence quick summary of what a product does allows me to make a quick decision about whether I'm interested in reading more about this product.

- Consistent plan cards lets me leverage my shared understanding of how plan cards work to instantly answer questions like what the monthly / annual pricing is like, what tiers are available, etc, that a bespoke presentation would require me to think about.

If I come to a landing page for a product, I'm more interested in answering questions like "is this a product I would like" and "how much does it cost" than appreciating the design of a page.

I would personally like a little more consistency and a little less creativity in my UIs, TBH. Most UIs should be boring and effectively invisible, because if I'm paying attention to the UI, it's a distraction from the task or content that I actually care about. The web and electron have hastened a trend which I intensely dislike of every single application looking and acting completely differently for what is fundamentally the same thing. It's not that this variation doesn't matter: it's actively bad. (Not that UI design doesn't matter. Good UI design is important. But part of what makes UI design good is consistency and that's what web designers seem to actively dislike)

(more precisely, I long for the days of a standard and customizable UI toolkit. I should be the one who can adjust what the UI looks like, not hundreds of different designers with different concepts of how to 'stand out')

Bingo! People mustve forgotten about the bootstrap era

Well there you go. If you want to differentiate yourself today, just use bootstrap!

My trick, I just use bootstrap, ask Claude for a custom Styles following a style, palete etc. Much better experience than buying and adapting and existing bootstrap theme

> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap

Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.

But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS.

That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.

You absolutely have to know how CSS layout works to do anything even marginally complicated with Tailwind. It's not a replacement for building flexbox layouts or dealing with Z-indexes or knowing how to compose elements for different viewport sizes. All it's actually separating you from is (most of) the "Cascading" part and having your styles separate from you elements.

>Bootstrap ships components.

I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.

I miss that 2010s startup look

That lobster font we all used for our startup names was legendary

lobster.ly

Bootstrap was originally built so internal Twitter apps had a decentish UI

Here's the discussion we had about bootstrap 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413

(The underlying webpage is no longer around. But the HN discussion is.)

The underlying webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventureg...

i feel like this isn't a tailwind problem it's the homogenization of component libraries like shadcn daisyui etc. all remarkably boring,

pair that with the field of ui/ux thinking landing pages that say nothing at all and you get a million webpages that look the same. every sass does this. in fact, every saas had a slop feeling to it because of this before AI took off. before chat friggen jippity and now claude and gemini were ubiquitous, i was regularly rolling my eyes at every. single. saas. website.

all the examples in OP don't look like a tailwind specific thing to me at all. they look like a broader boring internet-webdev equivalent to live laugh love pinterest home interior designs that predates the AI slopfest. this is the web styling VC's have been demanding from the startups they've invested in for many years now.

as far as tailwind goes, it's more like a utility set of classes but i see no reason why you can't get creative with it. feel like it's catching strays here simply because everyone's vibe coding and it's a common path for trained models to choose but that really says not a lot about tailwind and a whole lot about how people are choosing to use tailwind. it's not like tailwinds providing a breadth of components or is locking in certain stylistic elements. it's just that everyone's making the same choices because everyone's slopping their front ends.

What a bunch of nonsense. Tailwind doesn't come with components.

You're technically wrong, because you're not precise enough •́ ‿ , •̀

https://tailwindcss.com/plus

But yeh, they aren't the thing we're talking about here.

Writing CSS from scratch sucks. I'm glad we've left those days far behind.

Also let's not pretend like typical efforts were not buggy as hell with oversights or tricks that didn't work in every environment.

Modern CSS is actually really quite pleasant.

It's great for document formatting. For app layout, it's very easy for the cascading aspect to shoot you in the foot if you're not careful (which is why even the most purist CSS writers will tend to layer abstractions or rules on top of it, even if it's only convention based ones without technology like BEM.

Emphasis on the modern CSS. @layer, @scope, etc. go a long way in fixing the footguns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com