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Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

> The point is not to hide the complexity of CSS, but to provide access from the markup to enough of capabilities of CSS that you don't have to edit your stylesheets 95% of the time, when you alter the styling of a document.

This makes Tailwind seem like a lot of machinery (in the sense of bundle size, running code, and pseudo-language) just to avoid opening a file at dev time.

Layouts are often "collaborations" - the effect of multiple items interacting. You'd still need to open multiple files to understand what was going on. Or read the DOM in the browser. When I read component code, I almost always prefer it when the style _isn't_ in the same file as the JS. It takes up space on the screen and gets in the way of reading about the behaviours.

I don't get the propertied benefits. Granted, I've still not used it.

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Really? Tailwind sucks but that's literally the only good part of it.

Locality is one of the most important things in code. If I'm reading line 38 of foo.js and something elsewhere in the app effects that line, I want that something to be on line 37 of foo.js, not line 158 of bar.js.

The problem with Tailwind isn't the co-locating of HTML and CSS. It's that it does it by adding an entire new layer of complexity that's basically a copy paste of an large standardised API with the names of everything changed. It's barely even an abstraction.

> This makes Tailwind seem like a lot of machinery (in the sense of bundle size, running code, and pseudo-language) just to avoid opening a file at dev time.

It’s not about avoiding opening a file. It’s about avoiding the risk and/or cost that comes from editing a stylesheet that applies globally. If you change existing rules, you risk breaking the layout somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Or, to avoid that, you treat the stylesheet as append-only, leaving you eventually with enormous files and selectors of ever increasing specificity.

Tailwind (or Tachyons) makes for ugly markup, but it solves a real problem, and it does it better than anything else.

But can't you do the same with CSS ?

If every selector in a file begins with the component class, isn't it the same as writing styles in the component JS file ? I mean, the only real benefit I see is the forced encapsulation in JS compared to "soft" encapsulation in CSS. But, it's something so trivial to learn and practice that the soft part shouldn't be an issue. And if it is, then it is time to learn some rigour, no ?

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