I've really seen Tailwinds take off lately in "marketshare" as well as "love-share".
On the other hand, the CSS ecosystem has been in mayhem for years...
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I find the Tailwinds utility-first approach to be a really pleasant way to work with CSS, and CSS and pleasant are rarely used together in a sentence.
...But we've been here before in so many ways. I'd love to get folks' opinions on the CSS space.
Oldest comments (60)
Big step forward. I just wish there were more alternatives.
I almost never do any frontend stuff, mostly backend or native Android, but with tailwindcss I was able to quickly throw together a nice design that was build responsive without needing to write a single line of CSS myself.
Adam Wathan (tailwindcss creator) is also taking this to the next level and looking for 2 people to join him fulltime.
Backend with same experience here.
I'm working on something personal and Tailwind saved me the work to write lots of styles I didn't have enough idea of.
It's simpler than Bootstrap (which is my default many times) and easier to use.
Some good feedback came out of this post.
What are your thoughts on Tailwind CSS?
Nick Taylor (he/him) γ» Jan 27 γ» 1 min read
TLDR in the comments in that post seems to be you either love it or hate it.
Why tailwind is better than bootstrap ?
You can't compare tailwind with bootstrap . Tailwind is a utility first framework, which does not give you ready-to-use components. Bootstrap mostly gives you ready-to-use components.
on the other hand bootstrap has this aspect of css utilities. So you can take out only the scss of bootstrap and use it with whatever react / angular / whatever framework and you get the quite decent bootstrap styling. Only by reusing their css vocabulary.
I can't wait for tailwind to mature a little bit more. Tailwind feels like it really allows you to leverage the power of css without so much of the pain of following arcane naming rules, getting stuck into a framework, or not knowing what is going on with your styling.
I think the idea of
utility first approachis the way forward. This gives flexibility to the engineers to build UI's how ever they choose while leveraging the power of the utility. The utility updating under the hood allows to better browser support.In my opinion Tailwind is a big step in the right direction.
Not everyone is comfortable with CSS and the utility approach is a good way to mitigate those shortcomings, enabling them to develop and prototype responsive and clean UI faster, while allowing more experienced users to have a solid foundation to work and extend on.
I have never used Tailwind but I agree bootstrap is kinda overkill.
True. Bootstrap is for CSS what JQuery is for JavaScript. They had their moment indeed, and now they are fading way :P
Big step forward. Quoting myself from my reply to Nick Taylor's post:
I think it might be bootstrap killer?
To answer the question: I think Tailwind is here to stay. I put it in the same boat as other CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Bulma.
It has a good advantage because its styles are quite specific and utility-like, which allows us to style things any way we want. In comparison, something like Bootstrap provides classes for components and not many utility classes. To modify components further, we need to write our own CSS. Of course the downside of Tailwind CSS is that because each class provides less styles, we need more of them in our HTML.
So it has pros and cons, as with anything, but it's a great option to have. It's my preferred choice for a CSS framework.
However, I still strongly believe that something like BEM is more suitable for larger projects that value scalability, robustness and pixel-perfect designs.