Re:Don't use Tailwind for your Design System
by redbar0n on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @08:01AM
(#34337892)
> Is it just me or has the underlying purpose and value of “cascading” in CSS been lost within these abstractions.
I think you have a point. I think the cascading part was ignored for containment purposes during authoring, so it would scale and be predictable for larger teams. But ideally, I think we'd want to author using something like utility classes (or repeated style props?), but then compile them away to abstractions that cascade accordingly during runtime (least amount of kB sent over-the-wire as there would be as few as possible duplicated classes in the HTML, but also presuming that browsers using the cascade is more runtime performant than applying lots of atomic utility classes..?). Then we'd get abstractions without the cost of dealing with author-time abstractions (and having to name them). But then again.. there would then be a disconnect between what CSS classes you see when you author and what you see when you inspect the HTML/DOM... At least the utility classes are 1-to-1...
I think you have a point. I think the cascading part was ignored for containment purposes during authoring, so it would scale and be predictable for larger teams. But ideally, I think we'd want to author using something like utility classes (or repeated style props?), but then compile them away to abstractions that cascade accordingly during runtime (least amount of kB sent over-the-wire as there would be as few as possible duplicated classes in the HTML, but also presuming that browsers using the cascade is more runtime performant than applying lots of atomic utility classes..?). Then we'd get abstractions without the cost of dealing with author-time abstractions (and having to name them). But then again.. there would then be a disconnect between what CSS classes you see when you author and what you see when you inspect the HTML/DOM... At least the utility classes are 1-to-1...