I strongly prefer "button is-primary is-fullwidth" over the long list of tailwind classes.
Also, have you ever tried to update old designs using tailwind? It's a disaster. Far easier to know what styles the ugly bem card class you mentioned apply to, rather than an arbitrary b-2 m-1
<div id="parent" class="group"><a class="group/hover:bg-black">Hover</a></div>
// Not actually needed, here
// for competition
.group {}
// Child selector
.group:hover group\/hover\:bg-black {
background-color: black;
}
// Which is essentially the same as
.group:hover child {
background-color: black;
}I don't think Tailwind has a built-in `:has` tool, but I suspect it would be easy to add one as a custom class.
the second part of your answer answered it perfectly. Thanks
It’s the same as how they enable media queries for example, they’re not using JS just plain CSS, but they’re making it available with these inline classes.
<div class={tw(
"block",
"transform transition-all",
"bg-white ring-1 ring-black/5 rounded-xl shadow-2xl",
"max-w-3xl mx-auto overflow-hidden",
"group-data-closed/dialog:opacity-0",
"group-data-closed/dialog:scale-95",
"group-data-enter/dialog:duration-300",
"group-data-enter/dialog:ease-out",
"group-data-leave/dialog:duration-200",
"group-data-leave/dialog:ease-in"
)}>
...
</div>
But consider that a UI is 100% state management and side effects (so fundamentally imperative and asynchronous). On top of that it takes about three revisions for any tool to require bespoke display of something (everybody has an opinion). They also bring a layout engine which is best expressed in constraints.
And somehow we are trying to shoehorn all this into a functional paradigm.
I have used and programmed enough kinds of UIs, since I got coding into that Timex 2068 in 1986.
This sort of thing is objectively ugly and takes a minute to learn. The advantages of this approach I found is two-fold
1. You can be more confident that the changes you are making apply to only the elements you are interested in changing
You are modifying an element directly. Contrast with modifying some class that could be on any number of elements
2. You can change things around quite quickly
Once you're well familiar with your toolset, you know what to reach for to quickly reach a desired end state
No one is writing a long paragraph of styles for _every_ button in their app.
Very much not true. LLMs love doing this!
I like BEM personally. "navbar__item" scopes the styling to the nav item
> Once you're well familiar with your toolset, you know what to reach for to quickly reach a desired end state
This also applies to plain CSS, doesn't it?
The big value add that Tailwind brought isn't their utility classes IMO - it's their philosophy around having a design system of consistent coloring and spacing. I actually borrowed that for my own projects. It taught me to be a lot more diligent about specifying the system upfront. Put it in CSS variables and re-use those
Inline css
1. Can’t use media queries (responsive design).
2. Gets you to specificity hell.
3. Does not follow any system or reuse of values.
4. Values can’t be centrally changed. Utility clases are still classes - when you change config to make color different it changes everywhere.
5. Its verbose. Utility class can have multiple css rules.
Conceptually it might seem that inline css is similar but thats just feeling. Functional css (utility classes) are about composing classes with simpler (one purpose) behaviour together to create complex behaviour.
Or you end up redefining dozens of CSS variables inline :)
As someone that did a lot of CSS like 15 years ago when fullstack was the norm, then just sporadically for various non-public tooling, is that yes, the old ways of trying to position things really sucked and had a lot of hacks and some of those trail-n-error "how-does-this-change-the-elements-position" seems to still apply, but are much rarer now with grids/flex etc. But the structure of CSS itself is very straight-forward to me and has almost always been?
Is what's really going on that when people are trying to use vanilla CSS they go overboard with keeping CSS DRY? Which ofc ends up with an interdependent mess that's becomes increasingly harder to change. Just stop that? Start namespacing and copy pasting? CSS doesn't need to be compact.
Every non-tailwind project I've ever worked on inevitably devolved into a mess where you have 50 billion CSS files scattered all over the place, many containing classes that contradict and override other existing classes, often in completely unclear ways as it's hard to know in which order things will get compiled ultimately. As time passes, you'll see BEM done in various ways, you'll see cursed SCSS functions that generate styles dynamicslly, you'll see a bunch of !importants, and eventually you end up in a state where making a change to a legacy page becomes an exercise in dodging specificity and ordering minefields.
Meanwhile with Tailwind, everything is localized to the element it's affecting, and very importantly the entire team has a "standard library" of properties and patterns they can pull from, so you don't end up with people in different teams naming similar UI patterns differently, and you straight up never have to think of specificity ever again (which in my view is a boon, despite what CSS purists might say). Yes, the HTML is more verbose, but this is just such a non-issue after the first 5 minutes of discomfort, plus all the other benefits.
Hot take, but the Cascading part of CSS has proven itself to be a massive drawback, and not a benefit. Tailwind obviates that completely.
If I do something myself, I keep using bootstrap, as it is good compromise for those of us not honoured with CSS mastery.
Ironically I have no issues making great looking UIs with native toolkit.
In 5 years the tailwind craziness will be replaced by the next shiny CSS of the month.
I'm never gonna argue learning proper CSS wouldn't be better, but Tailwind is by far the path of least resistance for someone that has no interest in writing frontend for a living. It's like putting legos together, it requires very little thought to get from nothing to a decently looking website.
This is not how custom functional css codebase looks. In custom projects you change the system/configuration to fit the project. You create your own utilities for example you wont have “text-lg sm:text-xl font-semibold tracking-tight” but will have class “font-heading-2”. Similarly you will create button/input classes that have you basic styles.
Generally you start with just simple utility classes inside html and go from there and where it make sense or its too complex you separate to more complex class. You end up with short css file that only has these special components and none of the basic stuff.
For most elemets it ends up like “flex justify-center gap-4”. In BEM i have to invent “nav-secondary__header” put it in correct place and hate myself when i need to change it to “flex justify-beween”.
Tailwind popularised functional css but is also aimed at masses/noobs. Somehow some of those concepts also resonated with some experienced users.
At that point, why not write these in CSS instead? There is little advantage in using the tailwind shorthand classes in your own class definitions.
- You can use plain CSS variables for theming
- You're bringing back the supposed downsides of cascading and shared classes
- simple Gzip compression will achieve similar size reduction as the utility classes
Working on your codebase now requires full knowledge of the Tailwind utilities, layers, directives, pseudo-classes, theming, and all the complexity that comes along with them.
But like the person you’re responding to said, the ergonomics improve for the majority of cases that are just ‘flex items-center gap-2’.
And yes, you could write it all yourself but Tailwind is a good set of defaults for those classes and minimizes bike-shedding and improves consistency. These are useful things in lots of teams.
I don’t really use Tailwind on smaller personal projects because I love CSS, but in an org of mixed skill levels, it’s pretty damn useful.
(Also, Tailwind uses CSS variables. It had solid support for them in the last major and first class support for it in the current one.)
> There is little advantage in using the tailwind shorthand classes in your own class definitions.
There are few massive advantages. I dont have to figure out how to name these classes. Other people in the team know them too. And when they see class they dont know they know its something custom probably for a reason.
> You're bringing back the supposed downsides of cascading and shared classes
I never said cascade is bad. Creating new flat class with 0-1-0 specificity doesn’t break Tailwind. I’ve been through enough of - everything has specific class that’s nested/scoped… from my experience and usecase it’s harder for little benefit except neater html.
> simple Gzip compression will achieve similar size reduction as the utility classes
I meant custom css that you write by hand and have to scroll trough. Not the result pushed to browser. With functional css you manage to do most of the work in html and what doesn’t make sense you can do traditionaly. For example i dont like doing complex hover interactions in Tailwind so the html has all the layout utilities but also custom class that only has this custom interaction behaviour.
> Working on your codebase now requires full knowledge of the Tailwind utilities, layers, directives, pseudo-classes, theming, and all the complexity that comes along with them.
Is knowing Tailwind naming conventions worse than not having any convention at all? My experience is that Tailwind are just classes that are documented. Without it we would have classes that are undocumented.
There are cases where functional css is not that beneficial. Like in long running products which have single file component workflow where css is scoped and html/css live in same file. But in work i do in small team we just found it to solve many our painpoints.
We had css, then SASS/LESS/etc, now Tailwind.
In the days of just CSS people would create variables/functions for their CSS in their server side language & have the server side language create the CSS. SASS/LESS allowed us to do that in stylesheets.
Now we have Tailwind (and of course CSS variables). Tailwind (and the code editor plugin devs) have done an amazing job at making a great workflow to handle CSS, especially in component type UI designs.
* Shout out to Foundation and Bootstrap for also helping us get to where we are today. Foundation is underrated in the history.
Because most of those classes are per component.
If you have a single card component defined with these classes, and then repeat it 20 times on the page, then of course the output will look like a giant mess.
> How did tailwind get so popular?
- quick to understand and get started with
- much cleaner for components than the variety of CSS-in-JS libs
- (mostly) do not require fighting CSS with BEM-style atrocities
- come with nice default styles and colors that can be easily changed and extended
> Learn plain CSS. It's really good now
CSS is okay now. We only just got nesting and scoping
The big problem with Vanilla CSS is that's it's sort of like Perl. It's a read-only language in practice.
Yes, theoretically, you can have perfect semantic CSS classes and use those. In practice, not every button is the same and you'll need slightly different styling in different places.
Yes, we could go in and change the .button class. But who is using the .button class? Where is it used? Nobody knows, and you can't find out. So editing that class is EXTREMELY risky. I have seen many an entire application break because some dev decided to edit CSS. The bigger the application, the bigger the risk.
Where I work, we have 1500 devs. Does anyone know the complete set of usecases a CSS class would have? No. Even if I gave you a month to research it, you would not find out. So you cannot edit CSS classes, it's far too risky.
So, the result is that everyone just tacks on to the end of the CSS. And now, in your clean code world, you have 50 different button classes. Um... whoops.
If you want to compartmentalize, what you can do is use components, in whatever backend/frontend framework you have. You can have the component have their own state and allow users of the component to change parts of it. Then, it doesn't matter how "unclean" the tailwind is - because you'll almost never see it. But if you need to change it, you can, without destroying the entire application. No more 50 button classes, and no more read-only implementations.
However I use it in a much more blended way than the authors probably prefer. I use it with Tailwind Variants and to quickly hack out components. However depending on the project, component, and etc I may also construct BEM-based CSS files to live along side the component.. I use "@apply" in the CSS files, something the author(s?) are on record saying they regret. However I'd counter them by saying if it weren't for "@apply" Tailwind wouldn't be where it is today..
I stumbled on Tailwind in 2018 and introduced it to a team looking to revamp a pretty massive project. I remember that the initial proposal I made was to treat it like Bourbon[1] and write classes that build on Tailwind’s utilities. That way, you can still have `.button`, `.button-primary`, and `.button-primary__accent` etc without the cryptic classes in the HTML.
However, after reading Tailwind, the team found it much easier to write the pre-built classes and stack them as they progressed. And it worked; if I don’t care about how the code is written, things were consistent. It reminds me of “Pixel Perfection” before the responsive design era, when things looked as designed in Photoshop and printed for clients during presentations.
It is also pretty good configurable utility framework but that is secondary and new version 4 is worse at customisation.
So people are moving to https://unocss.dev/ with tailwind naming conventions.
<div class="group relative w-full max-w-md mx-auto bg-white dark:bg-gray-900 border border-gray-200 dark:border-gray-800 rounded-2xl shadow-lg p-6 md:p-8 transition-all duration-300 hover:shadow-xl hover:border-blue-500 dark:hover:border-blue-400">
<div class="flex items-center justify-between mb-4">
<h3 class="text-lg sm:text-xl font-semibold text-gray-800 dark:text-white tracking-tight group-hover:text-blue-600 dark:group-hover:text-blue-400 transition-colors">Team Settings</h3>
</div>
<p class="text-sm sm:text-base text-gray-600 dark:text-gray-400 leading-relaxed mb-6">Manage your team permissions, invites, roles, and integrations here. Changes apply instantly across all team workspaces.</p>
<div class="flex flex-col sm:flex-row gap-4 sm:justify-end">
<button class="px-4 py-2 text-sm font-medium text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-200 bg-gray-100 dark:bg-gray-700 hover:bg-gray-200 dark:hover:bg-gray-600 rounded-md transition-colors">Cancel</button>
<button class="px-4 py-2 text-sm font-medium text-white bg-blue-600 hover:bg-blue-700 rounded-md shadow-sm focus:outline-none focus:ring-2 focus:ring-blue-400 dark:focus:ring-blue-300 transition-all duration-150">Save Changes</button>
</div>
</div><div class="group card">
<div class="flex items-center justify-between mb-4">
<h3 class="card-title">Team Settings</h3>
</div>
<p class="card-description">
Manage your team permissions, invites, roles, and integrations here. Changes apply instantly across all team workspaces.
</p>
<div class="flex flex-col sm:flex-row gap-4 sm:justify-end">
<button class="btn btn-cancel">Cancel</button>
<button class="btn btn-save">Save Changes</button>
</div> /\* tailwind.css \*/
.card-container {
@apply flex flex-col md:flex-row items-center justify-between
w-full max-w-screen-xl px-6 md:px-12 py-8
bg-white dark:bg-gray-900 border border-gray-200 dark:border-gray-700
rounded-lg shadow-md space-y-6 md:space-y-0 md:space-x-8
text-sm text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-300 font-medium tracking-tight leading-relaxed
hover:bg-gray-50 dark:hover:bg-gray-800 transition-all duration-300 ease-in-out;
}I doubt that changes your mind, though.
Yes, CSS in theory is powerful and has everything necessary to avoid using Tailwind, but in practice CSS has a major flaw: You’re almost required to build a semantic model to get the full power. But this ignores that designers are working with mood and emotion just as much as document structure and information architecture. Capturing these more nebulous concepts as logical semantic rules is very difficult if not impossible. Tailwind just codified what everyone already did: Skip the semantic dance (“Making that text bold would be really cool, but what does it mean to be cool, as a general rule?”) and just create semantic rules like “bold” and “red”.
The "good CSS" you're talking about was always the product of convention, and it was never sustainable for big, long-term projects. The CSS Zen Garden showcase only made sense in a world where everyone shared the same document or document structure. Those insane stylesheets depended on the source HTML document's inherent structure, which is the exact opposite of separation of concerns.
Inexperienced developers always underestimated the complexity they were adding to their project by using overly abstract classes and hidden structures between the DOM and the stylesheets. Tailwind (or any reasonable CSS methodology even) recognizes these problems and solves them.
Not everything needs that level of separation, but to say that even basic separation is a problem to be solved by jamming everything into the class list is completely wrong.
Nobody said this.
Nothing semantic about .bg-white.