Comment by unclebucknasty
2 years ago
Kind of hard to see Bootstrap and Tailwind so casually lumped together with regard to how they break semantics, as they are at least an order of magnitude apart in that. Bootstrap will throw in a p-0, but Tailwind is designed to essentially make everything a p-0.
And that's an important distinction, as I think the current challenge with CSS for designers (and everyone) is that it now sits between design and development. That is, we've long departed the document model use case, wherein you're simply laying out a static Website that you just want to be consistently styled across pages and easily changeable (perhaps the optimal semantic use case).
We now build apps wherein we encourage essentially inline styles to be co-located with components. That itself is a complete rejection of the semantic CSS model. And it's exactly why Tailwind—being explicit about its purpose in an application development context—goes that order of magnitude beyond Bootstrap.
But, how does a designer work semantically in this context?
I think there are a lot of things wrong with Web development these days and styling at the component level is an example of one. Tailwind is the right tool for the wrong job. It solves a problem that shouldn't exist. And, in doing so, tempts some to believe CSS is the problem.
Edit: Don't get me wrong. CSS has its own problems and a good number of them. But it can't be blamed for not being used semantically in the current Web development environment.
The designer doesn't work semantically. Working with tailwind is like digging the hole for a pool with a spoon instead of a bulldozer.
They repeat the same tailwind classes 20,000 times and if the application gets bigger they repeat it 40,000 times and if they have to change the way it looks it is the mother of all cut and paste jobs.
There is an unholy convergence of the tools being almost but not quite adequate, the platform being driven by companies that have overly favorable unit economics (Google could care less if it cost $2M to make a simple web site) and a designer mindset that is all too comfortable with trading a bulldozer for a spoon.
Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.
I am a reluctant convert to tailwind. I've been doing HTML since the 90s, before CSS was even really usable for things like page layout. I mean, we didn't even use div in those days - it was table based layouts and spacer gifs.
CSS appeals to a programmers mindset. Cascading seems like a good idea. Having classes that are reusable seems like a good idea. Complex selectors seem like a good idea. These are all forms of abstraction, almost like functional composition but not quite.
But after decades of fighting with it, I have to admit that it just doesn't work. The myth that you could change an entire site design just by changing the CSS is a complete myth. I've been party to more than a few whole site redesigns and I can assure anyone unfamiliar that it involved a heck of a lot more than updating CSS (and more than HTML in almost every case as well).
In fact, almost all advancements in CSS (including Sass and Less) seemed to tend toward isolating the effect of changes. Pretty soon most projects had a compenent.html/component.scss pair for every fragment and naming conventions like BEM [1] became the norm. Reusability for things like fonts and colors were handled with CSS variables.
Tailwind is proof to me that isolation is more important for visual design than abstraction/inheritance/cascading. Inline styles would be the same advantage but they are way too verbose.
1. https://getbem.com/
> The myth that you could change an entire site design just by changing the CSS is a complete myth.
You should tell that to this site which has been doing exactly that for 20 years: https://csszengarden.com/
4 replies →
BEM sucks then you die.
2 replies →
> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C"
How is that different from:
Or creating a new utility?
https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles#using-modi...
Note that the Tailwind team strongly anti-recommends @apply and regrets ever putting it in there. As for creating utility classes, well, those are still utility classes. If you do semantic classes then you are fighting against the philosophy of Tailwind as detailed in the Refactoring UI book.
5 replies →
Exactly. It's the frameworks driving the abuse.
I actually think CSS is the wrong tool for modern webdev. Or rather, it should be the output of a compile process instead of something that designers and developers wrestle with.
In general, we're building these complex SPAs, and still working directly in standards that were intended for a static document model. Part of the reason is we somehow believe we need infinite customizability, so for that we're writing in Assembly.
But, the truth is that user interfaces are largely consistent and should be. Still, even if we did want maximal customizability, we should use tooling that generates the CSS, etc.
And that tooling should be visual. I mean think about the fact that we're trying to hand code visual designs with text. Or that it was so accepted that we're only recently trying to generate the code from design tools like Figma, which is still imperfect.
So many thousands of developer hours lost to this effort. Bass-ackwards to be sure.
Maybe it is the properties that are good and the selectors that are bad. One could point to a trend in the last 15 years of HTML and CSS being tuned up as an application platform.
I'd point out the grid layout and flexbox as being features ideal for application work and https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110405/forms.html#form... is practically a love letter for applications.
1 reply →
> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.
I feel the same. Give the component a class and then in the SCSS assign the setting there. But inlining each individual CSS setting? I don't get it. Sure maybe great for a quick prototype / MVP. But as a permanent tool? I don't see it.
> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.
This mindset is the problem. You don't want or need this abstraction in the CSS, what you want is to encapsulate these styles properties in a reusable "HTML component", and then use that component wherever needed. It then carries those style properties into every instantiation. What use are semantic style classes in this context? Atomic CSS makes perfect sense in this context and makes composable development a breeze by comparison.
> Atomic CSS makes perfect sense in this context and makes composable development a breeze by comparison.
I should have also mentioned that your "semantic CSS" is necessarily anti-composable by contrast. Any reusable HTML components with semantic classes now require you to manually lift their CSS definitions into your CSS top-level context, which is a step that isn't required with atomic CSS / tailwind.
What happens when you move on to the next project—which may have a completely different design motif—and you want to reuse those components? Do you have to restyle each component independently?
> Tailwind is the right tool for the wrong job. It solves a problem that shouldn't exist. And, in doing so, tempts some to believe CSS is the problem.
This articulates a problem I’ve had with Tailwind for a while, and not quite been able to put words to.