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Comment by machinelabo | Hacker News Reader

Taiwind CSS is how you get incoherent overall design. Each element is customized to "look" nice but there is no overall architecture and design system. Padding here and padding there, this bold and that bold - visually tuning the entire page to look nice, but lacks a level of design coherency that is achieved best with a classic CSS based approach. You can do it with Taiwind to "remember" standard padding/spacing and Tachyons does it better than Tailwind, but I personally prefer the classic method even though its not as immediate as Tailwind classes inline with HTML.

People are allured by the rapid prototyping aspects of Tailwind which is the main bait. It's pretty fast to see results immediately without openining the css file.

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This seems directly in opposition to my experience of Tailwind. Assuming you are using some sort of component based setup, like React, Tailwind mercilessly enforces consistency. You can't just use padding-left: 10px in one place and padding-left: 12px in another. Same goes for font-sizes and everything else. You're locked into the design system to such a degree that its a lot of work to deviate from the standards. Couple this with components that ensure the proper reuse of style and markup and everything is consistent everywhere.

If you are working on more of document project where markup reuse through components or partials isn't available then I could totally see your design elements like buttons or cards becoming inconsistent but your spacing, font-sizes, z-indexes etc. will still follow the system.

People are allured by the rapid prototyping aspects of Tailwind which is the main bait. It's pretty fast to see results immediately without openining the css file.

This an interesting psychological point to discuss IMO, we get lured to things that feel "fast" but actually aren't.

That sounds just like Duolingo (it feels like you're making progress because you're getting better at the things that it's testing, but unless you try to participate in real conversations in the language, you're not making progress in an actually useful direction)

It is actually fast though. Just doesn't produce coherent design over time and creates a huge mess where design langauge is intertwined in symantic layout.

Hey, wasn't that the original intent of HTML+CSS? To isolate markup and design?

> This an interesting psychological point to discuss IMO, we get lured to things that feel "fast" but actually aren't.

It's not so much “feels fast but actually aren’t” as “fast onramp that makes downstream maintenance slow”.

That people tend to be bad at balancing downstream costs against current benefits is well known, and that's even outside the context of business situations where the cost is attached to a role that decision-makers may expect to be out of before the cost is realized, and outside of social contexts like speed-of-this-iteration-focussed development methodologies that structurally encourage discounting future costs.

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