I am going to give it a try. The argument against using it is that it defeats the purpose of Tailwind, but I think its useful to start by spraying classes until things work and then moving those classes into e.g. btn-primary once the styles become stable and need universality.
Yes, @apply exists, but is generally discouraged (and the rationales are given right on that page)
> If you start using @apply for everything, you are basically just writing CSS again and throwing away all of the workflow and maintainability advantages Tailwind gives you
Approaching it with moderation is probably worth trying though
It's the same as any DRY or optimised code: taking time and effort to make things overly DRY or optimised up front is a waste, building stuff out and then refactoring when you realise it's going to be repeated is a better workflow. With tailwind, that's simple because you take your string of class names, slap an @apply on it, and then use the new classname instead. No, it's not significantly different from just writing CSS then, but it's the workflow that's changed that reduces the friction between prototyping and then refactoring into a reusable design that makes Tailwind nice to work with in my experience (and I'm using it for a large-scale commercial project, not a landing page or static site).
I'm pretty sure the creator's intention is that you basically don't use @apply at all, except maybe edge-cases where Tailwind simply can't be used (for example, I think before v3.0 you couldn't set print styles, i.e. @media print)
The intended method of not repeating yourself in Tailwind is using a framework, and writing the styles in the template of the component.
I am going to give it a try. The argument against using it is that it defeats the purpose of Tailwind, but I think its useful to start by spraying classes until things work and then moving those classes into e.g. btn-primary once the styles become stable and need universality.