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Comment by koakuma-chan

3 days ago

Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.

> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there

It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.

There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.

> and nobody knows what is going on there.

For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).

One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening

  • > I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

    You mean custom classes?

    • I mean stuff like adding `display: block` on the parent and `flex: 1` on a child element. Clearly a copy-pasting leftover because someone or whatnot, but then you're debugging a layout issue and you're wondering "but why is this here"

Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind

Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

The main problem is the premise of tailwind

Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values

They put all that in one style sheet

Which became the one style sheet on earth

Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps

Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.

  • >Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

    IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.