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Comment by kytazo | Hacker News Reader

On the tailwind argument I don't really feel like ever going back in spending a good 2 minutes coming up with a non conflicting yet descriptive class name only to end not using it at all cause I decided to implement the requirement in a different way. Not to mention the relief from the constant css/html context switch you undergo indefinitely.

I can't really comment on how it scales in big projects tho.

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I always find the criticism of localised styles and so-called separation-of-concerns violations amusing, given that the vast majority of user interface APIs to have ever existed have you set the styles directly on the elements.

I think there’s maybe a few desktop UI APIs that use a similar approach to CSS, but having a separate declarative style sheet is almost unique to the web in the grand scheme of things.

I guess it’s mostly people with a document-first mindset to stuff on the web, but I don’t think CSS is a good way to style application UIs.

Desktop UI APIs had/has the benefit of some OOP inheritance and a good set of standard components, plus separating layouts from styling. The web has only recently caught up with 2nd, and solved the 3rd in its own way - but it really is funny how insane amount of work is needed to have a custom date picker on the web vs on even something like WinForms.

This. And for big projects it comes with the advantage of locking everyone into the tailwind.config. Everything has tradeoffs.

But to me, removing the context switch is like an ADHD cheat code. I’ve grown to enjoy the ability to look at one block and know exactly what it looks like as well. There’s no key value search to know why some bit of text is red for example.

Funny it took humans 20 years to figure that out.

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