I'm a huge proponent of Tailwind. What I tell people is to ignore their gut impression and just try it out.
Equivalently, my first impression of HTMX is that I kind of hate it. But I could see it being similar to Tailwind, where you just need to try it out and then it'll click. Is that fair to say?
I second Tailwind as I can't stand complexity, so I'm trying to simplify the entire stack down for _just_ my needs. Tailwind is a big part of simplifying my life.
The other part is that I'm trying to simply "fix HTML", and I believe HTMX is pretty great. I'm taking a different approach as I have a reactive backend, and I can make the HTML simply be a template of a streaming JSON object. It's like mustache with reactive data binding.
I'm enjoying, but I'm not a consultancy so I don't need to push the framework for every usecase.
I've tried Tailwind, and as a back end dev who only really understands the basics of CSS I find it a bit overwhelming and open ended. Seems it's designed for people with already a really deep knowledge of CSS who can could create beautiful components with it if they wanted but for whom hooking up the CSS to the components is painful. If you aren't good enough to create components with CSS in the first place, seems better to stick with things like bootstrap/bulma no?
Or you can use tailwind-ui components that look way more polished.
Another big advantage of the Tailwind approach is that you can copy any component you see on the web, paste it in your project, and it will look the same (unless custom classes are used). No need to hunt down and adapt the whole cascade of styles for each tag.
In that sense, Tailwind has some of the earlier-Internet charm where you learned by seeing what others were doing.
100%, absolutely. It’s not an abstraction of CSS; if you don’t know the language already then it won’t help. But if you do, then it improves your productivity dramatically.
If you’re in a scenario where you’re tasked with building out UI, but don’t have design or FE skills, my recommendation would be something like bootstrap or MUI.
Agree. The idea of Tailwind just feels wrong because it goes at the opposite of everything we can believe regarding content/style separation. But the fact is, it's amazing to use.
Maybe it's not for everyone, but it really is worth a try, with an open mind.
It’s such a cool experience - actively disregarding well-established principles that have been in place for 20 years…only to have it fix nearly everything that I hate about CSS.
For me, it clicked immediately. It is a simple way to partial updates of the UI, without having to worry about a ton of tooling. It also pushes most of the logic to the backend, which is nice. It also constrains some of the UX decisions, leaving less room for useless craziness.
Equivalently, my first impression of HTMX is that I kind of hate it. But I could see it being similar to Tailwind, where you just need to try it out and then it'll click. Is that fair to say?