Tailwind vs Semantic CSS
nuejs.org
Comparing two identically designed websites, their weight, amount of HTML and CSS, rendering speed, and best practices.

This study compares two websites with similar design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS.

  • @[email protected]
    18•9 months ago

    Tailwind feels like CSS i have to re-learn. It’s maybe slightly easier? mostly it just makes my html unreadable to the point i barely know what’s going in anymore. I don’t do much frontend stuff but i’m gonna go back to plain old CSS for my next project. It all sounds good in theory, but in practice, tailwind has been more work rather than less. I feel like i put a fair amount of time in understanding how everything works too.

    It just really feels like one of those things that makes little difference but i wasted way roo much time on trying to give it it’s fair chance.

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      Absolutely, the goal of Tailwind is not to allow you to skip learning CSS, and if you don’t know CSS well, Tailwind is going to be pretty painful.

      • @[email protected]
        0•9 months ago

        I’ve seen people advocate for Tailwind because “CSS is too hard, I don’t want to think about selectors”.

        CSS isn’t too hard, there are easy ways to do things, and hard ways to do things (for backwards compatibility reasons). If you don’t learn modern CSS then you’re only going to be doing things the hard way.

        • @[email protected]
          1•9 months ago

          I’ve seen people advocate for Tailwind because “CSS is too hard, I don’t want to think about selectors”.

          Yep, those people are wrong :)

          (I mean sure, you can sort-of mostly skip selectors if you use Tailwind, but selectors are about the easiest part of CSS. I’ve never heard of someone struggling specifically with those but not with e.g. layouts, stacking context, relative font sizes, etc.)

        • @[email protected]
          1•9 months ago

          That’s how i got sold on it too. My CSS skills aren’t great, tailwind made it just slightly harder to deal with CSS i feel. Seems healthier to learn actual CSS instead of abstracting it away if the benefit is that low in the best of cases. Sure, large projects are a thing, but nobody puts a whole project in 1 css file anymore anyway, so what does it matter at that point.