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Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

You manage this complexity the same way you manage the complexity of repeated code nearly anywhere else: you encapsulate. If you have a standard box (div + styles) that you use everywhere, abstract it in whatever way you're writing your application allows. For example, a component in React.

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Or...a CSS class? I think the point is that CSS already has the means for abstraction built right in. Using an application framework in order to abstract a list of styles adds unnecessary complexity that compounds upon itself.

Somebody writes a React component to abstract a button and its standard styles, and all seems simple enough. Then we need marketing styled buttons, and buttons that are anchor elements, and ones that are small and large, and inverted and with and without shadows because the design people insist, with icons, block width, pills, etc, etc. And you end up with a monstrosity component with all sorts of bespoke interface that everyone has to learn, when some cascading classes and plain HTML would have entirely sufficed.

That seems to be a straw man its never just plain html and CSS. Even if it were, what you describe just devolves into dozens of similar or slightly different (many times by mistake) classes that all need to be maintained.

I would much rather dig into a component that has been built to be flexible for all of those needs to keep it up to date, restyle of add new behaviors and designs requirements vs going through hundreds of html files looking for all of the classes that were created to do those variations you list above (including effectively duplicate (or worse yet cascaded with different behaviors to accommodate the different html construct they were placed on when created).

I really did dislike tailwind from first learning about it, but using it has turned me on it 100%.

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