What I really think you're saying is that Tailwind is a huge time saver when it comes to design, and compared to your past experiences translating designs to CSS it felt like a net win.

A lot of people disagree with Tailwind's design philosophy on both the developer and consumer side of the code (i.e. DX and UI), so it's questionable what "real project" and "time saver" really mean; ironically, I question that your definition of "real project" even included a team with design chops.

> ironically, I question that your definition of "real project" even included a team with design chops

“No, you have never worked on a real project!” :)

Both can be real projects, without quotation marks. I’m constantly surprised that there are so many different ways and processes to build a website; and people who think theirs is the best.

Indeed, personally I would never open a conversation with that, but I believe this is someone gussying up their personal hobby project where they learned how to use a CSS framework into a "real project" while they denigrate someone else.

If we're going to discard some projects as real, a pretty easy filter is "were multiple people required to build it". People who need Tailwind to provide their design system like Tailwind, but they are usually working on very small-scale projects they're unlikely to maintain and upgrade like a project with real users, real design, and multiple engineers would. And a pretty easy proxy for the latter type of shop is "do you have people who aren't even front-end engineers doing your design", and that commenter was displaying all those signals to me.

> I question that your definition of "real project" even included a team with design chops.

Do you believe that

The New York Times (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/nytimes

Shopify (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/shopify

OpenAI (2023): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/openai

GitHub (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/github

The Verge (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/the-verge

Google (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/google-io-2022

Microsoft (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/dotnet

Netflix (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/netflix

Mashable (2022): https://tailwindcss.com/showcase/mashable

don't have teams with "design chops"?

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Anecdotally, I can tell you that Tailwind is heavily favored by shiny designery startups. Many of the best designed websites these days are built with Tailwind, and design-oriented engineers are reaching for it first.

Back in 2018 I was arguing against utility classes and vetoing their use in projects I was involved with in favor of thoughtfully architected SCSS. By now in 2023 it's clear Tailwind has earned its place in high-end UI development.

Nice list. Did you actually look at those sites?

Your first example implies "The New York Times" uses Tailwind. Besides that being hilarious, you click the link and immediately see there is a big subheading "Events"

I have never heard of NYT "Events", so I checked out their page:

https://www.nytimes.com/events

> Do you believe that [The New York Times Events doesn't] have teams with "design chops"?

Yes, yes I do.

Not really going to bother with the rest, you're joking if you think these top corps meaningfully rely on this 2-year-old CSS framework. I exactly believe that you're linking me to things thrown together quickly by a resource-strapped team, the "Events" example merely affirmed it

Some examples of SaaS companies that use Tailwind on the application side are PlanetScale, Fly.io, Lemon Squeezy, and Supabase.

I agree. The main uses of Tailwind are people making template-based pages, or putting up informational offerings in front of service-oriented businesses which give people APIs to build their own apps on.

Many believe there is a direct choice between best tool for a type of job, and a best tool for a type of person.

The right path is having tools the team is currently, or will be productive with, and isn't the markedly wrong tool for a type of job.

I like Tailwind, but I like it precisely as a non-frontend person working on side projects: it lets me iterate quickly without a deep knowledge of CSS (while at the same time providing an introduction to modern CSS).

I can see how that would also be a benefit to a "SAAS starter pack" where you have a small team wearing many hats, probably people with a familiarity with CSS but not experts. The code base in these early stage startups and side projects is going to be small and you want to move quickly. Tailwind is great at that.

However if you have a frontend team of CSS experts to draw upon, the benefits of Tailwind are fewer and the downsides are greater - your CSS people will not enjoy having your classes named things like "px-2 py-1 rounded border bg-blue-800 text-white font-bold hover:bg-blue-500" rather than just "btn btn-primary". They can iterate fast anyway and they will probably leave more maintainable HTML and CSS/SCSS in the long run.

However I'd still be interested if any large teams (with correspondingly large code bases) have made Tailwind work for them.

By real project I just meant something more substantial than a tiny hobby project. Maybe something that takes a few months or more.

I have. It's essentially a write-only DSL for CSS that, were you to group it via @apply or similar, you have reinvented CSS classes. In fact I had a huge thread discussion on HN about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34922232

How on earth can styling every **damn hyperlink inline over and over again be a time saver?

You don’t have to if you define it globally.

Then you're just reimplementing CSS classes in Tailwind.

and so most people using tailwind don’t do that and redefine everything every time. Ignoring or ignorant of the elegance and power of css.

I don’t think anyone is typing out every link at this point.

Html is split into components or views or partials. Links are inside loops etc.

You save time every time you don’t have to think about coming up with a new class name or how it might affect the hierarchy.

I totally understand it feels weird to begin with but on a major project you never worry that your css tweaks might affect some other obscure part of the site.