Tailwind is a Leaky Abstraction

I have to admit: as I’ve watched Tailwind enthusiastically adopted by more and more of the frontend community, I’ve remained skeptical. But, having never used it, I decided to keep quiet until I had an informed opinion.

Well, I’ve spent the past few months at work learning Tailwind with an open mind. I can now confidently say that I do, in fact, dislike Tailwind, and I wouldn’t use it for any new projects.

Tailwind is commonly described as “utility classes”, but that’s a bit of an understatement. It’s essentially a small language you write in the class attributes of your HTML that compiles to a combination of CSS rules and selectors — an abstraction over CSS. But all abstractions leak, and Tailwind is very leaky.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

3 Likes