I don't recommend Tailwind CSS

> The problem with Tailwind is that you cannot resolve this ambiguity even by reordering your classes.

I guess the author has never heard of tailwind merge.

We already tried the fully semantic web in the days of XHTML, where the document is purely semantics and CSS purely transformation.

It didn't work in practice, because people want to structure their document based on how they expect it to be presented.

My understanding is thay HTML5 was built on the understanding that language purity just went in the way of productive compromise.

The cat shoutbox thing was fun, but it stopped working.

I'm still on bootstrap, and it still works for me.

People tend to overlook the main benefit of Tailwind: components and pages become self-contained. As such, changing them doesn't cause unintended side-effects to other pages and all or parts of a component can be dropped into another page and it "just works." This is a huge benefit as the normative/intended behavior of CSS makes changes risky on large sites. Now, there are other ways to do this, but Tailwind is quite effective at it.

> .red-color{

> color:red

> }

> .big-text{ font-size:20px }

My theory is that higher-level abstractions don't need to add any value to be popular, you can just create a single dependency that abstracts away one lower level dep, and people will use it only because they want to avoid learning something, in the end they will actually learn the thing with a proxy in the middle, but at least they took a shot at skipping the 'grind' of learning css.

It’s funny how, upon opening the website, you’re immediately greeted with a “Was Top 1 on Hacker News” link leading back here, but (at time of writing) it has under 50 points and almost every comment disagrees with the post.

While I don’t really have a strong opinion on Tailwind CSS, I do have a strong negative reaction to websites who advertise to everyone how many people are on the page, especially when that’s shoved in our faces and people can send malware links and spam to everyone else (as is happening in droves).

I know complaining about the site is poor form, but it is really hard to take advice seriously for a site that lets other visitors spam... just general internet things to other visitors.

Cute idea, but it is pretty clear the author doesn't consider practical consequences, so why should I trust their judgement about Tailwind?

I can immediately spot organizations void of any skilled frontend engineering leadership by their use of Tailwind.

Generally coupled by some memory leaking React soup, solving 2016 SPA problems in 2026.

Likely 30-something years old MIT-bred leetcode ninjas that know little to nothing about front end technologies in the first place. They don't even remember _why_ the industry reached for client-side rendering library at some point. They think it's for interactivity. HN comments are quite telling about it.

Bloated slop is bloated slop, I still have to find a single example proving me wrong, and what's produced on top of react-tailwind by billion dollar companies just confirms my negative bias around the people using it, the results speak for themselves.

tailwind is the worst thing ever, i hate this so much

ok

My sass customers don't even know what css means, it's fine. Nobody cares as long as the things they expect are on the page in the right position and font is readable.

I registered my first domain 1997 and before that already coded websites: members.aol.com/…/

I saw the inception of CSS, the infamous ACID test, IE6, web standards movement - anything and everything.

To this day, CSS is something that is not separating design from markup (try logic, you will get it), and as all things technology is now a mix of technical constraints, backwards compatibility, totally conflicting decisions.

I am traumatized with floats and clearfix, and there was a lot of debate around CSS 3, JavaScript.

Layout wise, “the web” aka web traditionalists or whatever went bezerk against any attempts to allow for what today is dominating: print layout as role model.

Formerly flow was all about responsive web design, being as fluid as it gets.

CanIUse had to be brought to life to solve the questions, what features needed to be done in JavaScripts, which not.

Stylus, BEM, bootstrap, SCSS etc.

All kind of conventions and preprocessing helpers.

CSS is hard and will stay hard, in fact I am stunned by the author’s total ignorance of where CSS came from, why something is the way it is.

Maybe he is just a young gun and thinks that CSS is only flow, grid and CSS3 and always waiting for cool new features which do what? What purpose do they have, which problem do they solve?

Tailwind is genius. There is pro and con for everything but looking back it is just another evolutionary step on the shoulder of the mentioned giants.

To this day no framework or system was more simple and elegant than Tailwind.

The author’s naive conclusion is a variation of the running gag that started with https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

Tailwind is shadowing native CSS functionality? I felt pain reading this because so what? That”s not the point.

We use preprocessors, postprocessors, optimizers - what I don’t want to do is using CSS’s own bad naming nomenclature which is used because of backwards compatibility.

In fact abstracting away basic functionality and simply let the compiler decide what is best given the situation is mentally helpful.

Working in large teams, or many teams. Guess what will happen: we build our own CSS framework, well we build ten because everyone knows best.

The author really should be thankful for the genius job Tailwind does, because he seems extremely inexperienced and never faced hard challenges.

In fact if your only problem is to decide between two frameworks, you are lazy and not considering other people.

Browser compatibility, breaking changes, different CSS as well as JavaScript engines - this was brutal.

Today? Luxury discussions.

The fact that Tailwind allowed for a gazillion of partly stunning CSS design systems and React components like ShadCN and others is proof enough that Tailwind is a platform with the best pro/con ratio so far.

This has never been the case before. This is a singularity.

I was founder and product lead for a huge and critical to business financial platform, seeing others easily augmenting your platform via interfaces or plugin patterns as a structured approach is genius.

Extensibility is a sign of elegance and perfect abstraction.

Are there downsides? Who cares with all these never seen before massive benefits?

The killer against laissez fair CSS is exactly this: have you ever lead an approach to develop a framework? Why do you want to build yet another TW?

Drop it. It won’t work. The question or better your solution hints at being a solo dev.

This is fine but you seem so one sided in your views, I am puzzled.

If I could use just native CSS boy oh boy - do you really know everything about it? Could you understand a floating layout? Could you see pro and contra for its use case or do you just not allow its usage? If yes, why if you cannot answer the question?

How do you make sure, there is standardization? How do you train and coach people so that they know and can use CSS?

What are your naming conventions? Why this way, no other way?

How do you deal with devs leaving, new joiners?

Who is overseeing the repository? Who has merge rights? Who does the code reviews?

What do you do if there was an emergency and some big shot or very important order had to be accommodated and now you have garbage CSS in your platform that you must maintain and everyone can use?

Boy oh boy - I love Tailwind. The versatile solution that was 30 years in the making.

All you delusional freaks out there with the hubris belief: tell me how it went.

I just covered a few questions. Deployment is yet to debate etc.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Nobody does. Yet it is everywhere, like AI slop.