It's definitely not a one-to-one relationship between Tailwind classes and single CSS rules in every case.
That's not the important part though. Whether you're using classes or inline styles, even if one lets you do more things with less typing, the fundamental difference is that you are inlining the actual styling into your HTML.
There may be a CSS document somewhere that defines some more powerful tools in the form of classes, but those aren't styling "rules" in the same sense as with normal CSS; they end up being more similar to CSS properties, in that they just toggle atomic design elements like a colour or the text alignment.
The actual styling is still in your HTML though, so no, it is just plainly wrong to claim utility classes are somehow fundamentally different than inlining CSS using the style attribute. They may be more powerful and convenient, and that might for many be the deciding factor as to why this approach is okay to use while inline CSS is evil; but some sort of defense has to be made. One cannot simply claim that "they're different things" and dismiss all criticism of inlining styles into HTML.
There's a separate discussion to be had about whether enough of the problems with inline CSS aren't present, or whether the most relevant ones still remain, and that discussion can be a lot more nuanced and ultimately up to personal preference and picking the right tool for the job.
I'm a professional PHP, Python and Javascript developer from the UK. I've worked with Django, Laravel, and React, among others. I also maintain a legacy Zend 1 application.
The @apply directive renders much of that moot, though, since once you've settled on a style that works you can easily use that to extract common patterns into reusable classes. It depends on the context you're using it in, and for using component libraries like React it often makes less sense, but certainly if you're using Tailwind in something like Blade or Twig templates then using @apply is more commonplace.
I'm a professional PHP, Python and Javascript developer from the UK. I've worked with Django, Laravel, and React, among others. I also maintain a legacy Zend 1 application.
No, because Tailwind still works as an abstraction layer. And you can combine the two approaches however you see fit - it doesn't have to be either everything using the utility classes direct or everything using the apply directive.
It's like JSX in that it sounds arse-backwards when you first hear about it, but if you try it then once you get over the hump it starts to make a lot more sense.
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That's not the important part though. Whether you're using classes or inline styles, even if one lets you do more things with less typing, the fundamental difference is that you are inlining the actual styling into your HTML.
There may be a CSS document somewhere that defines some more powerful tools in the form of classes, but those aren't styling "rules" in the same sense as with normal CSS; they end up being more similar to CSS properties, in that they just toggle atomic design elements like a colour or the text alignment.
The actual styling is still in your HTML though, so no, it is just plainly wrong to claim utility classes are somehow fundamentally different than inlining CSS using the
styleattribute. They may be more powerful and convenient, and that might for many be the deciding factor as to why this approach is okay to use while inline CSS is evil; but some sort of defense has to be made. One cannot simply claim that "they're different things" and dismiss all criticism of inlining styles into HTML.There's a separate discussion to be had about whether enough of the problems with inline CSS aren't present, or whether the most relevant ones still remain, and that discussion can be a lot more nuanced and ultimately up to personal preference and picking the right tool for the job.
The
@applydirective renders much of that moot, though, since once you've settled on a style that works you can easily use that to extract common patterns into reusable classes. It depends on the context you're using it in, and for using component libraries like React it often makes less sense, but certainly if you're using Tailwind in something like Blade or Twig templates then using@applyis more commonplace.At that point, haven't you just gone full circle and basically achieved nothing other than introducing two new dependencies?
No, because Tailwind still works as an abstraction layer. And you can combine the two approaches however you see fit - it doesn't have to be either everything using the utility classes direct or everything using the apply directive.
It's like JSX in that it sounds arse-backwards when you first hear about it, but if you try it then once you get over the hump it starts to make a lot more sense.