The Pros and Cons of TailwindCSS

Why Tailwind is not just inline CSS

In the world of front-end web development, Tailwind has become the CSS framework that has taken off more than any other recently. Despite this, it has its detractors.

The premise of Tailwind is that instead of creating a set of selectors and bespoke classes to style your code (as has been common practice for 20 years), you use a large set of single-purpose utility classes that each does one thing. In essence, you add nearly all your style right into your frontend HTML, React, or Vue code.

So instead of something like this:

<div class="card-body">
  <h1 class="card-title pricing-card-title">$29 <span class="text-muted">/ mo</span></h1>
  <ul class="list-unstyled">
    <li>30 users</li>
    <li>15 GB</li>
  </ul>
  <button type="button" class="btn btn-primary">Buy</button>
</div>

You might instead have this:

<div class="mt-12 space-y-4 sm:mt-16 sm:space-y-0 sm:grid sm:grid-cols-2 sm:gap-6 lg:max-w-4xl lg:mx-auto xl:max-w-none xl:mx-0 xl:grid-cols-4 border border-gray-500">
  <h1 class="text-lg leading-6 font-medium text-gray-900">$20 <span class="text-sm">/ mo</span></h1>
  <ul class="mt-6 space-y-4">
    <li class="flex space-x-3 text-sm text-gray-500">30 users</li>
    <li class="flex space-x-3 text-sm text-gray-500">15 GB</li>
  </ul>
  <button type="button" class="mt-8 block w-full bg-gray-800 border border-gray-800 rounded-md py-2 text-sm font-semibold text-white text-center hover:bg-gray-900">
  Buy</button>
</div>

If you've never used Tailwind, your first reaction might be "Yikes! Holly #@&%ing classlists! How is this a better way to style my content?"

• It looks weird.
• Some of those class names are long.
• There's a lot of repetition (imagine having several of these blocks on the page).
• In many cases, it looks and works a lot like using  style tags with inline styles on elements.

Despite these apparent drawbacks, there are many benefits to the approach that Tailwind offers. And I assure you, Tailwind offers a lot more than shorter ways to add inline styling.

Here are the main benefits of using TailwindCSS.

1. No more thinking of names for style classes

Using traditional methods of styling requires you to consider what types of content and styles you might have and then attempt to create classes allowing you to apply these styles. Or you have base styles that work most of the time but you sometimes might need to override them. This can get quite overwhelming, begging questions like:

• Will I use this more than once?
• If I use this again, will it need to be a bit different in some way?
• What naming conventions do I use?
• Should I name this after the appearance, the function, or something else?
• What conventions should I use to name and organize my CSS?

Naming might not sound all that challenging, but considering all of the above then try to be consistent about it over time and across team members. It is actually very difficult! A tremendous amount of cognitive load is incurred, and this also often leads to "bikeshedding" amongst team members as they argue about the best names for things.

When using TailwindCSS, there's far less of a need to name classes, as you just apply the utility classes specified from the documentation. Once you start using Tailwind, most of the class names become fairly intuitive, and lesser-used ones are easily looked up in Tailwind's excellent documentation.

2. Much less switching contexts between CSS files/style blocks and HTML code

Normally when you’re writing your core webpage structure, you’ll be writing HTML and JS, and often think things like

• “I just need to add some margin to this”.
• “This text needs to be bigger.”
• “I have to make a class for this new type of element.”

Every time you do that, you have likely needed to either switch to another tab of your IDE with your CSS or scroll all the way up to the top of your document head where you’ve got a <style> block.

Whenever you do this, you have this context switching and have to spend time moving around, making the change to your CSS, and then getting back into the document.

When you use TailwindCSS, most of the time you are styling things inline, right in your CSS in the class attributes, so you don’t have to switch to this other section of your code. That makes you so much faster. If you’re already experienced enough that you’re used to working the former way, you probably don’t even realize how much time you’re spending switching between documents and finding your place, but this is a tremendous benefit to the utility-first approach to working with CSS.

3. You can use variants with media queries, pseudo-classes, and child-selectors

Inline styles cannot use media queries. For instance, if you want an element to display one way on small screens, and another way on large screens, you would normally need to create different sets of selectors in different parts of your CSS. This can be quite cumbersome because you have to find multiple sections of your stylesheet and edit them.

Fortunately, Tailwind allows you to do all of this kind of styling inline without having to create different selectors for each variant. Here are just a few:

• Size classes (sm, md, lg, xl)
• hover
• focus
• active
• dark mode (through either parent class or media query)
• first, last, odd, even
• form states like required, invalid, disabled
• group and peer to modify things in the child or adjacent elements
• before and after to modify pseudo-elements
• placeholder (for form elements that aren’t filled in)
• markers to style bullets in lists

There are a ton and more of these variants are being added all the time. Check the variants page on the docs for a more complete list with examples.

4. Tailwind helps enforce a coherent design system (without being too restrictive)

If you’ve ever tried to design a large, complex site, or created a design system for a company to use, you might know that it can be tricky to enforce design decisions across a team or many pages over a long time.

Tailwind really helps with this because you can set up Tailwind to allow only specific values, instead of just having everything set to an infinite range of possible values.

• A color palette is defined with reasonable steps between shades.
• Spacing values are only allowed at certain intervals so spacing looks consistent. You have to choose between 12, 14, 16, 20 etc, and not every possible value, so you are less likely to end up with slightly different spacing between very similar elements.
• There’s a set of fonts, weights, and font sizes to use.
• The width breakpoints are predefined for your responsive design so you don’t have many breakpoints. (You can easily add more).

Of course, you can and probably will customize any of these values as required, but the point is that you don’t have to think “Hmm, do I need 18 or 19 pixels of spacing here?” or “Should this color be #1122FF or #1128F0?”. You have a defined list of values to choose from, and this makes styling things more straightforward and consistent easier.

5. Your production CSS only has styles you actually use

If you’ve ever maintained a massive stylesheet, you might know that over time, you might end up with a lot of cruft in there. Some styles were put in there with the expectation they’d be used a lot, but the code applied might not even exist in your codebase in time. When that happens, it can be a lot of work to look for those classes and elements and prune the unused style from your CSS. Or worse, you just leave it in there for fear of breaking something.

In Tailwind, you’re going to be generating your CSS automatically using a build process, so your stylesheet will only have the utility classes you actually have in your code. This means that, for smaller sites, your CSS stays pretty small and compact. And for larger sites, it still remains reasonable.

6. Utility classes cache well

Inline styles can’t really be cached because they have to be reloaded along with the HTML content. A CSS file can be more aggressively cached, improving page-load speed.

The flip-side of this is that the actual HTML may be larger with Tailwind because of all the utility classes in the content, compared to making large classes that extract the complexity out into a stylesheet. But this ends up being a pretty good tradeoff, because the repetitive nature of utility classes compresses quite well at the transport layer used to transfer webpages, so the resulting difference in data transfer speeds and page load performance is extremely negligible.

7. It’s easy to make style changes without overriding things

With a utility-only approach, you rarely have to worry about CSS precedence mucking things up or complicated and annoying style conflicts. If you have large hierarchies of style with nested selectors, then you want to make a change, you might find yourself having to resort to using !important, which is rarely a good idea because it’s impossible to override that later.

Using Tailwind, your styles are usually applied directly to the thing you are styling, and if you want to change a thing, you just change it, you don’t have to fight with higher-priority styles that have higher specificity somewhere in the chain that you have to find and contend with, like in the example below.

form.master input {
  padding: 8px;
}

/* Later on in the stylesheet… */


/* This style will not be applied in a form with class “master” because the above has higher specificity */
form input {
  padding: 4px;
}

8. Extracting components helps keep code DRY

What about the repetitive nature of Tailwind? If you have a bunch of styled list items, for example, you seriously have to apply a big list of classes every time?

Yes and no. If you were coding a large document completely by hand, this could certainly get tedious, although in those cases, modern IDEs would let you select and edit all of them simultaneously anyways. (Multi-cursor editing is an absolute god-send!) But in most practical websites, highly repetitive parts of a document are usually generated programmatically through a loop anyways. So you only really have to write such code once.

In cases where you may need to reuse a block of code, it makes more sense to extract this to reusable components in your framework (like React, Vue, or even Blade). This way you can also combine the relevant structural HTML with all the styling for it, and have one source of truth for this bit of code that might appear on many pages.

Finally, if extracting components doesn’t make sense in your situation, you can also use Tailwind’s @apply functionality, which allows you to combine multiple Tailwind classes into a single, custom class, and combine the benefits of Tailwind with a traditional CSS approach. This can be very handy for things like buttons or form elements that are used frequently but may not have the complexity necessary to extract a component.

9. Tailwind styling is so much easier to maintain!

This may be the biggest benefit of Tailwind - if you have a project using Tailwind, changing styles is very straightforward most of the time. Especially if you’re making prolific use of styled-components. You simply go into your component and change the classes, or change the classes in the code you want to adjust.

In a more typical CSS environment, you might have to make changes to a large CSS file, and when you do this, it is not clear where exactly those styles are used, so testing and validating the changes is quite difficult and could have knock-on effects that aren’t obvious at first. Using a utility-first approach means you don’t have to dig around in a messy CSS file and hope you’re not breaking things or causing conflicts.

Drawbacks of Tailwind

To avoid seeming like a frothing-at-the-mouth Tailwind fanboy, I’ll concede that there are some drawbacks to using Tailwind. It’s not always perfect for all scenarios. Here are some of the major concerns.

1. A build step is required

Although originally Tailwind was just a stylesheet you could pull in, newer versions require you to run a build process to generate the CSS. This means that there’s some extra overhead to the process of creating a web page. If you’re not familiar with front-end build processes, this can add complexity that could be overwhelming to a newer dev. Fortunately, this process integrates well into the build processes used by many front-end frameworks already, and using TailwindCLI makes it fairly easy.

2. Setup and learning curve

If you already know CSS, Tailwind is another thing to learn. You have to install it, figure out how to configure it the way you want (if you can’t just accept the defaults), and then learn the conventions and class names and how different parts of Tailwind work.

Fortunately, Tailwind has excellent documentation that makes it pretty easy to find what you need, and there are lots of good tutorials and examples available. A couple of days of study and practice is usually all that is required to be fairly proficient.

3. Larger HTML sizes

Because the utility-first approach often involves adding a lot of classes to your HTML, the download size of the HTML may increase. The advantage of this is that this type of extra, repetitive data tends to compress very easily, so the net difference in user experience may not be significant. Sarah Dayan from Algolia addressed this concern in her talk “In Defense of Utility-First CSS”. In it, she demonstrated the difference between a utility-first approach and a component approach with an existing page and found that the uncompressed size was about 20% larger than with the utility-first. But once compressed, the difference was only a few percentages.

Furthermore, the CSS document was larger than the component approach, and it ends up being a more complex document that requires more processing for the browser to traverse and apply.

Still, if you’re trying to create some kind of very highly optimized content, it could potentially be more efficient to use bespoke classes with very short names.

4. Tailwind can’t do everything

While the capabilities of Tailwind are increasing all the time, there are some CSS properties and advanced techniques that are outside the scope of what it can do. This means that from time to time, you may have to add some inline styles or create some custom classes alongside Tailwind to get things done. Is this terrible? Not really, but it does mean that Tailwind isn’t a panacea for all needs.

5. It could stop you from learning CSS properly

If you are very new to CSS, I wouldn’t recommend you use Tailwind, because you should learn how CSS works first. You need to understand

• most of the selectors (id, class, element, spaces, adjacent element, and so-on)
• CSS precedence - in what order does CSS apply?
• Specificity - how the browser calculates which CSS applies (and which doesn’t)
• How common, frequently used CSS properties work
• How the CSS box model works
• How flexbox works and how to use it
• The basics of how CSS grid works

All of this can take several years to master, so jumping straight into using a framework like Tailwind will leave you with some huge knowledge gaps that could affect your ability to do web design competently and compromise your ability to find work. Using Tailwind is convenient when you already understand CSS, but relying on it to compensate for a poor understanding of CSS is a bad idea.

6. It reduces the separation of concerns between content and style

The original philosophy of CSS was that you should separate your style (CSS) from your document structure and content (HTML). If you can do this, a designer can easily change the style of a document without touching any of the HTML and affecting the content.

The canonical example of this is CSS Zen Garden, a website that has many radically different appearances by virtue of a set of 3rd-party stylesheets.

The creator of Tailwind, Adam Wathan, wrote a document explaining why separation of concerns is a straw-man argument that doesn’t hold up in the real world. The thing is, that in a real project of any complexity, either your CSS depends on your HTML or your HTML depends on your CSS, and they are very hard to separate.

Have you ever had a large project for which you completely refactored the HTML without changing any CSS? Or one in which you were going to restyle the site completely without adjusting any HTML? Not likely!

I think in practice, this is not a strong argument against Tailwind, but if you think this is important for the way you work, it is worth considering.

Conclusion

If you were on the fence about trying Tailwind or were a detractor of it for some reason, I hope this article shines some light on why its fans love it so much. It offers so many advantages for speed of development, maintainability, and efficiency. Besides all that, it has a great ecosystem around it of UI components and existing designs you can borrow, excellent documentation, and tutorial videos available for free on YouTube.

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