Frontend

Tailwind continues to be the bane of my existence. If you’re building a UI library, potential conflicts with the consumer are death by a thousand paper cuts. Yes you can prefix but the cost is getting everybody (including AI) to adopt your different class names. AI hates deviating from the norm and tbh so do I (my prettier.rc is always {}).

“But if you’re not building a library, it’s so much faster!” Maybe, depends on what you’re building and how well you know CSS. If you don’t wanna learn CSS, sure, but the spec keeps expanding and Tailwind has to keep up.

My biggest issue with Tailwind in non-library projects is that, in my experience, it makes people not make UI components. Your button styles, for example, are duplicated everywhere. Need to tweak a border radius? Cool, you have to update every button cause there’s no canonical styled button component.

Is that an inherent issue? No, but if you give people the choice to be lazy, they will be lazy. Is it a problem specific to Tailwind? No, but it’s so common in Tailwind codebases.

CSS modules all day. Sorry.

Engineer on Base 🔵 • Building BlockSocks 🧦 • Denver, CO 📍

✊🏻🙇🏻‍♀️ - I feel ya @typeof.eth (seriously 🤯).

🐵<🐦‍⬛> ← 🙈🙉🙊 → /phil →  phil.cockfield.net, db.team →  
ƒ(🌳) →  🧫 /sys  ←  @cell <T>, 🧠 human.

"problems at the margins" - beautifully put.

✊

And to be clear, I’m not denying it’s not useful. To me, it doesn’t scale well because it creates problems at the margins.