I’ve come to accept that this is just the world of CSS. I personally love CSS and find it to be a wonderfully expressive way to do things. But it’s also very different to the way other programming languages work, so people get frustrated by it. So we have a half dozen ways of using CSS without really needing to grasp CSS.
Tailwind is one of them and much like React it’s become such an abstraction over the underlying environment that you can become completely ensconced in its world without venturing to the APIs underneath.
The thing that gets me about tailwind though is that it is just css. I still have to apply identical styles that I’d apply if using raw css but instead I have to apply it per element and learn new names.
I’m glad people like it, and we’re getting great designs out of it. I happily use it as well. I just wish I better understood why people fall in love with certain tools.
> I just wish I better understood why people fall in love with certain tools.
Love is a strong word. For me it's more pleasant to use on a small scale, as I find it helpful to avoid an external stylesheet that I constantly jump to, and which constantly grows in size. Most projects I've worked on css was an "append only language".
I also find it helpful that it's a bit more concise than standard css properties (especially when dealing with most common props, like size, padding, margins, flex), and I can use them like inline styles but with the added benefit that I can rely on media queries as well.
It removes cognitive overhead. People are getting burned out on fiddle-farting with web UIs. We need styling but it is not the main focus 99% of the time and adds very little business value.
Tailwind is one of them and much like React it’s become such an abstraction over the underlying environment that you can become completely ensconced in its world without venturing to the APIs underneath.