A little weekend learning: Trying out Tailwind

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Woke up and took a look into my code. And decided to end this experiment with TailwindCSS and keep this branch as it is, a branch :slight_smile:

There are several things I observed that made me realize TailwindCSS is not for me:

  1. In the wild, when I looked into the examples, very few of them used @apply and most of the examples hurt my eyes plenty. Like the following example:
            <button class="text-base  rounded-l-none border-l-0  hover:scale-110 focus:outline-none flex justify-center px-4 py-2 rounded font-bold cursor-pointer 
        hover:bg-teal-200  
        bg-teal-100 
        text-teal-700 
        border duration-200 ease-in-out 
        border-teal-600 transition">
                <div class="flex leading-5">Next
                </div>
            </button>

I could have done it in CSS too. I already knew about border-radius, and I will need to keep that knowledge in my brain because it’s the framework independent way, however, now I need to keep rounded-*-* in my head. Multiply that by almost all the other properties.

  1. Even if I carefully apply things and get myself free from the overcrowded class situation, I will end up inventing my own way of doing and naming things, which may waste time in cases where I probably would be better off with sensible defaults and override when necessary, or just use CSS classes with CSS properties.

  2. If I am to prototype things where good semantics may not matter, I wouldn’t still use it because I have OCD about code organization and I won’t be able to sleep at night with it, getting back to point 2.

  3. In a team environment, there runs a risk of a case of “escaped applies”, a hard to debug situation where there was a card-image px-4 py-2 rounded left out unintended

  4. It’s slow to compile, probably I am missing some tool or steps but there you go, more tools, more fatigue.

So from my experiment, Tailwind does not teach me anything notable enough to go on with it. Maybe I am old fashioned and maybe I am not a front-end developer which makes me not get a few of its merits, but I will happily go back to the way I did things before :slight_smile:

Please read all of the above with a huge “In my opinion” in mind

Also, I have read this article and I agree with most of what’s mentioned here:

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