> A lot of people I respect really like Tailwind, but I just don’t get it.
I think I get it. For years there have been lots of popular CSS authoring conventions for JavaScript apps that are clever but complicated, fragile, and have a lot of churn. Most of these either have large JavaScript runtimes that generate and inject styles on the fly as components render, or deep integration into the JavaScript build system like Webpack/Babel/etc. plugins, or both.
I believe that there was intense fatigue from supporting these systems, keeping up with the newest versions and trends in the high-churn JavaScript ecosystem, etc. Tailwind essentially offers a ridiculously simple way out of this fatigue. You just say screw it, let's just author all our JS component styles using string literals that from JavaScript's perspective are just totally arbitrary HTML classes. No more importing things, or using plugins that transform the AST of our JS source code, or extracting chunks during SSR, etc. We just run this totally separate Tailwind compiler that looks for string literals that seem like Tailwind utility classes and generates a stylesheet that we just import in our HTML.
Tailwind is pretty great on its own as a utility CSS framework. There's a lot of thought put into the "API" of their utility classes, and because it's so popular there is a ton of support for almost any use case you'll come across. But at the end of the day, I think the reason for its ubiquity (particularly among respected veterans and "influencers" in the frontend community) is that is offers a way out of the "JavaScript tooling rat race" that was causing so much fatigue.
I think I get it. For years there have been lots of popular CSS authoring conventions for JavaScript apps that are clever but complicated, fragile, and have a lot of churn. Most of these either have large JavaScript runtimes that generate and inject styles on the fly as components render, or deep integration into the JavaScript build system like Webpack/Babel/etc. plugins, or both.
I believe that there was intense fatigue from supporting these systems, keeping up with the newest versions and trends in the high-churn JavaScript ecosystem, etc. Tailwind essentially offers a ridiculously simple way out of this fatigue. You just say screw it, let's just author all our JS component styles using string literals that from JavaScript's perspective are just totally arbitrary HTML classes. No more importing things, or using plugins that transform the AST of our JS source code, or extracting chunks during SSR, etc. We just run this totally separate Tailwind compiler that looks for string literals that seem like Tailwind utility classes and generates a stylesheet that we just import in our HTML.
Tailwind is pretty great on its own as a utility CSS framework. There's a lot of thought put into the "API" of their utility classes, and because it's so popular there is a ton of support for almost any use case you'll come across. But at the end of the day, I think the reason for its ubiquity (particularly among respected veterans and "influencers" in the frontend community) is that is offers a way out of the "JavaScript tooling rat race" that was causing so much fatigue.