This article does a good —if exaggerated— job of explaining the disconnect between markup and meaning, as well as the sheer volume of cruft. But tailwind does present well. Its plethora of sane defaults look… nice.
What I find myself doing more often than not is using tailwind classes in my handwritten SASS, using the @apply utility. I get tailwind's reset and typography but my markup isn't full of jank. PostCSS, PurgeCSS (or whatever's actually going on inside Vite) keeps everything small.
It's also good practice to try flying solo. A reset stylesheet and style everything, yourself. Few projects require that much CSS and it's a good excuse to try out some new ways of doing things. Because there are now several ways to accomplish major layout tasks, you can be quite expressive with CSS.
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I've seen a few comments saying that maintenance is harder without utility CSS scattered throughout your markup. I think if you're struggling to maintain a semantic site, you're doing something wrong.
Even if you're using a complex SASS+Purge build chain, a sourcemap tells you exactly what's going on with a quick right-click-inspect. This method of development gives you a lot more space to split and comment on your source than you might want to in the middle of markup. Good component names help too.
This article does a good —if exaggerated— job of explaining the disconnect between markup and meaning, as well as the sheer volume of cruft. But tailwind does present well. Its plethora of sane defaults look… nice.
What I find myself doing more often than not is using tailwind classes in my handwritten SASS, using the @apply utility. I get tailwind's reset and typography but my markup isn't full of jank. PostCSS, PurgeCSS (or whatever's actually going on inside Vite) keeps everything small.
It's also good practice to try flying solo. A reset stylesheet and style everything, yourself. Few projects require that much CSS and it's a good excuse to try out some new ways of doing things. Because there are now several ways to accomplish major layout tasks, you can be quite expressive with CSS.
---
I've seen a few comments saying that maintenance is harder without utility CSS scattered throughout your markup. I think if you're struggling to maintain a semantic site, you're doing something wrong.
Even if you're using a complex SASS+Purge build chain, a sourcemap tells you exactly what's going on with a quick right-click-inspect. This method of development gives you a lot more space to split and comment on your source than you might want to in the middle of markup. Good component names help too.