Thanks for great examples of real-life usage of TailwindCss!
I could see Brian's points as valid in the context of developing wordpress theme, which had me writing a lot of vanilla html + css with no great framework to encapsulate and re-use components. Maybe I just don't know a good way to do it, especially when you have to integrate with 3rd party plugins such as woocommerce.
Trying to juggle all the 3rd party classes, overriding them and trying to be DRY (as in not to rewrite all woocommerce templates for cart, product listing etc), also in keeping with wordpress standards simply left no place for TailwindCss which would bring more confusion to the table where each element has 5-10 "semantic" classes applied by woocommerce just in case.
This whole experience threw me back in time where "separation of concerns" is maybe a greater value and helps with readability.
Mykolas' example of using TailwindCss with frameworks that let you define and reuse components in very elegant manner (React etc.) also make perfect sense, and most of Brian's points against TailwindCss are not really a concern in a more modern codebase. I am ditching my wordpress theme and building a NextJS (React)+TailwindCss frontend and keeping WP+Woocommerce as a backend only. In this scenario, Mykolas' arguments make perfect sense.
I don't agree that Brian's points are all strawmen. They are one-sided maybe, but that's his opinion and I think a lot of readers could relate, especially if they're dealing with older code.
This clash of opinions makes me think - if you're dealing with problems that Brian brought up, maybe it's time you rethink tools you're using. If you have to manually crawl code to change some color in lots of places, it's not a question of CSS/SASS/Tailwind at all.
However, if you have no choice of technology to use or have to adhere to some standards or requirements where Brian's points resonate with you, probably TailwindCss will not make you life easier.
It's surprising how quickly we can go "all in" in these discussions :)
Ahh i can see the other side of things now. Had no idea that people with wordpress/woocomerce/older cobases have these issues. I've been lucky enough to only ever have worked with more up to date tools. I can see why this would be a big issue with tailwind in this case.
But like i mention in the post, i've said if you can't use it don't it's not the be all, end all.
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Thanks for great examples of real-life usage of TailwindCss!
I could see Brian's points as valid in the context of developing wordpress theme, which had me writing a lot of vanilla html + css with no great framework to encapsulate and re-use components. Maybe I just don't know a good way to do it, especially when you have to integrate with 3rd party plugins such as woocommerce.
Trying to juggle all the 3rd party classes, overriding them and trying to be DRY (as in not to rewrite all woocommerce templates for cart, product listing etc), also in keeping with wordpress standards simply left no place for TailwindCss which would bring more confusion to the table where each element has 5-10 "semantic" classes applied by woocommerce just in case.
This whole experience threw me back in time where "separation of concerns" is maybe a greater value and helps with readability.
Mykolas' example of using TailwindCss with frameworks that let you define and reuse components in very elegant manner (React etc.) also make perfect sense, and most of Brian's points against TailwindCss are not really a concern in a more modern codebase. I am ditching my wordpress theme and building a NextJS (React)+TailwindCss frontend and keeping WP+Woocommerce as a backend only. In this scenario, Mykolas' arguments make perfect sense.
I don't agree that Brian's points are all strawmen. They are one-sided maybe, but that's his opinion and I think a lot of readers could relate, especially if they're dealing with older code.
This clash of opinions makes me think - if you're dealing with problems that Brian brought up, maybe it's time you rethink tools you're using. If you have to manually crawl code to change some color in lots of places, it's not a question of CSS/SASS/Tailwind at all.
However, if you have no choice of technology to use or have to adhere to some standards or requirements where Brian's points resonate with you, probably TailwindCss will not make you life easier.
It's surprising how quickly we can go "all in" in these discussions :)
Ahh i can see the other side of things now. Had no idea that people with wordpress/woocomerce/older cobases have these issues. I've been lucky enough to only ever have worked with more up to date tools. I can see why this would be a big issue with tailwind in this case.
But like i mention in the post, i've said if you can't use it don't it's not the be all, end all.