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]
    0•8 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•8 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.

    • @[email protected]
      1•8 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.)