No, but it's based on a use-case that is very specific and considering that it's a relative uncommon one, I don't see the point of trotting it out. Okay, so in this particular situation maybe something like Tailwind isn't ideal. Nobody is arguing that it is.
> Honest question: would you pay for funding this? I think this haven't come to be is because it's much easier to sell a "turn-key" system than something that is flexible enough to get other developers to say "I could've done that as well."
Sure. I mean, I'm close to paying for Tailwind UI, so paying for good stuff is definitely something I'm willing to do.
But I think what you propose doesn't exist not for lack of payment, but because it's just not that easy to do. In lieu of perfection, stuff like Tailwind can be a pretty good improvement over other things. No need to whine about it or compare it to some hypothetical ideal that you deem good enough for your edge-case needs.
I think it's actually easy to do it. It can be laborious, but not hard. And even the labor is something that can/should be done only once. So the only justification that I can find to not have this as a more widely adopted practice is that using utility classes is "easier" to get started. Coupled with the fact that most people don't care about making their components "portable" between different designs, and we end up with this local maximum.
And from what I can tell, most of us do care about portability and componentization.
If your experience is different, then that's interesting, but not much of an argument in itself. Either 1) we're just much worse at this than you are, 2) your use cases and projects are more unusual/uncommon, or 3) what you think is 'easy to do' perhaps is not, and perhaps you'd benefit from a more Tailwind-like approach too.
Obviously if what works for you, that's fine. I don't use Tailwind in all my projects, and in some cases wouldn't even do so if I could. And it's not like what came before is entirely unworkable.
But it feels a bit dismissive to argue that our experiences are just wrong, or that we're just taking the lazy way out.
It is interesting how the immediate use-cases dictate our first opinions of the technology.
As I stated in one of the first comments of this thread: I am working on a self-hosted crypto payment gateway and I am providing a "Stripe Checkout" widget for those that want to set up a payment workflow inside their website.
I could do exactly what Stripe does and make one good-looking widget and just give the user the option to change some things like color scheme. But two things go against that: first, I am a terrible designer, so I am sure that anything that I come up with will not be as nice what Stripe does. Second, it is an open source project and I would rather have more people feeling encouraged to contribute their own different themes than trying to enforce "my" styling, which we already established will be bad.
What am going to do, then, if not ensure that I write the components without any predefined styling and perhaps offer an open source repository of "themes" - like CSS Zen Garden?
So, there you have it. My reason to argue for a "pure" HTML structure is not just out of some idealist out-of-touch mentality.
> When someone comes up with a popular style-free standard, assuming that's practically possible and good enough to become popular, I'd happily switch to that.
Honest question: would you pay for funding this? I think this haven't come to be is because it's much easier to sell a "turn-key" system than something that is flexible enough to get other developers to say "I could've done that as well."