Out of curiosity, have you used Tailwind and does your criticism come from having used it and not experiencing the progress or does your criticism come from reading how it works and not "feeling" it? I don't intend to follow up with discussion that convinces/dissuades/criticizes you in any way, I just ask purely out of curiosity.
I'm not the one you're asking but, I messed around with it a bit and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. There is just much hype behind it though, so I bought the book to really get a feel for it. I liked the book. I used it in a project and after going back to code written by a few members of the team, it just felt like an unmaintainable mess. The common response whenever I share this sentiment is one of:
* You don't know what you're doing
* You're doing it wrong
* You're an idiot.
It really kinda feels like the old AngularJS 1.x days as those were the typical responses to anyone who didn't fall down and worship it as a framework masterpiece. I've decided for myself, I'll sit this one out. Judging by history, most of the things we were fanatical about at first, we tend to look at with disdain in a few short years. jQuery, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Redux... It would be foolish to think this library/framework won't go the same way.
If you use it, and it works for you and your team, that's great. I would never try to tell you NOT to. For me, I'd rather not.
I had the chance to use Tailwind recently. I don’t think it’s disputable that in a sense it mocks the “cascading” part of CSS, though I’m not sure I’d hold that against Tailwind. It often felt as taking a shortcut to me, but it could be a worthy tradeoff and so far I have not noticed Tailwind overly complicating maintenance and development of an average project. That said, I don’t think I would choose Tailwind if I could use, e.g., web components with scoped styles or something similarly more in line with the spirit so to speak.
Yea I’ve used and I think it’s cool for prototyping quickly but the idea of coming back and making edits to it in production code a year from now terrifies the bejeezus out of me.
In most organizations I’ve been in components are used in applications that share a brand identity/style. Even if there are different brands consistency matters for each brand’s look/feel.
If styling is to be consistent then it’s way more maintenance to change each component to reflect branding changes than it is to have the brand/house style defined in one place and passed into the components.
E.g. decide that all the outlines around inputs, certain boxes etc. are going to be wider - that’s something you probably want to be able to change in one place not 20 or 100 down the line. Sure you “could” find and replace for some stuff but that could easily match the wrong stuff if you use tailwind on something big/complex… at least that’s my concern looking at it for stuff beyond quick prototyping.
