Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The designer doesn't work semantically. Working with tailwind is like digging the hole for a pool with a spoon instead of a bulldozer.

They repeat the same tailwind classes 20,000 times and if the application gets bigger they repeat it 40,000 times and if they have to change the way it looks it is the mother of all cut and paste jobs.

There is an unholy convergence of the tools being almost but not quite adequate, the platform being driven by companies that have overly favorable unit economics (Google could care less if it cost $2M to make a simple web site) and a designer mindset that is all too comfortable with trading a bulldozer for a spoon.

Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.

View on HN

I am a reluctant convert to tailwind. I've been doing HTML since the 90s, before CSS was even really usable for things like page layout. I mean, we didn't even use div in those days - it was table based layouts and spacer gifs.

CSS appeals to a programmers mindset. Cascading seems like a good idea. Having classes that are reusable seems like a good idea. Complex selectors seem like a good idea. These are all forms of abstraction, almost like functional composition but not quite.

But after decades of fighting with it, I have to admit that it just doesn't work. The myth that you could change an entire site design just by changing the CSS is a complete myth. I've been party to more than a few whole site redesigns and I can assure anyone unfamiliar that it involved a heck of a lot more than updating CSS (and more than HTML in almost every case as well).

In fact, almost all advancements in CSS (including Sass and Less) seemed to tend toward isolating the effect of changes. Pretty soon most projects had a compenent.html/component.scss pair for every fragment and naming conventions like BEM [1] became the norm. Reusability for things like fonts and colors were handled with CSS variables.

Tailwind is proof to me that isolation is more important for visual design than abstraction/inheritance/cascading. Inline styles would be the same advantage but they are way too verbose.

1. https://getbem.com/

BEM sucks then you die.

I wasn't a huge fan of BEM but it solved a real problem. The fact that sucky BEM was better for large teams than being without it shows how bad CSS design is.

There was nothing more annoying than including a component on a page and some aspect of the component was visually broken. Like a margin inflated somewhere or a wrong color. And then time would be wasted trying to figure out what was cascading/inheriting. Worse case it was some CSS included at runtime by some JS script that was forced onto the team by marketing. But on large teams there was just a constant collision between page authors, component authors and other stakeholders.

HTML Web Components tried to solve the problem by making the shadow dom isolated but in our experimentation the support was just too inconsistent across browsers. It was also a major pain to debug at the time (maybe this has gotten better?)

I was completely against Tailwind, absolutely hated looking at it and I even used my position as a senior engineer at a company to block its adoption. I felt it flew in the face of the entire premise of CSS and the high-ideal of separating form and content. I now believe I was wrong.

> I felt it flew in the face of the entire premise of CSS and the high-ideal of separating form and content.

I mean, you were right about that one. It's just that the entire premise of CSS is wrong and its ideal doesn't work.

> The myth that you could change an entire site design just by changing the CSS is a complete myth.

You should tell that to this site which has been doing exactly that for 20 years: https://csszengarden.com/

I am old enough to remember when the css zen garden first came out!

I've seen hundreds and hundreds of clever tech demos. I even believed in some of them for a time. Now I realize they were carefully constructed gimmicks.

css zen garden is made explicitly to do one thing and it manages to do that one thing. It's hard for me to even say that it does it very well, clicking through the featured designs. Unfortunately, the dream of redesigning a website that wasn't purpose-made for this particular trick remains but a dream.

I'm also old enough to remember that.

But I think it was clear from the very beginning that it was meant to be aspirational. Nobody is really claiming that today with CSS you can arbitrarily change the design of a page just by modifying CSS. If you look at the evolution from earlier designs on the CSS zen garden to later ones, it's clear that advances in CSS itself has made some designs possible. The ::before and ::after pseudo elements I believe are one of these advances that are critical.

> Unfortunately, the dream of redesigning a website that wasn't purpose-made for this particular trick remains but a dream.

I'm not disagreeing that this is a dream. I'm stating that it is meant to be a dream gradually becoming real.

I think it was different within different communities. For certain, not everyone shared the "dream" of a totally fungible web, but some did. I recall at the time a lot of discussion about user stylesheets. People actually believed that the same HTML could be sent to multiple different devices and the user would have their own stylesheet to effect the design by overriding the website provided styles. That might allow, for example, one person to have one font that they found more readable and another person to have color choices that suited their needs (e.g. for contrast), and another person to have different margin/padding to provide more/less whitespace between elements.

This was particularly a popular idea amongst semantic web people and was talked about a lot in the communities around things like rdf/rss/atom. You might have a reader for desktop, for your palm pilot, for your e-reader, etc. each with their own stylesheets being applied to the original document. XSLT was also a player in this space since you might want to alter the document structure itself ... a stylesheet for the XML structure itself.

Almost all of these wild ideas died on the vine. XHTML was one of the first to go. I haven't heard anyone talking about XSLT recently although it sometimes sneaks out from under a rock in some places. RSS readers are now marginal at best and the format is mostly used for distribution of podcasts these days. And I am not aware of anyone using user stylesheets for the web, or even if it is still possible.

Strangely enough the movement moved more towards open data formats. That is what Tim Berners Lee is working on these days inside the ODI. I think the movement rightly discarded most concerns about styling data or even displaying it at all. But we still have this legacy from the original ideas discussed above. The original semantic web folks were trying to solve both problems simultaneously and the formats we have are tainted by that history.

> You should tell that to this site which has been doing exactly that for 20 years: https://csszengarden.com/

Easy to do when you don't actually have to update the content or functionality. And even with those advantages, most versions of it look bad.

> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C"

How is that different from:

  D {
    @apply A B C;
  }

Or creating a new utility?

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/adding-custom-styles#using-modi...

Note that the Tailwind team strongly anti-recommends @apply and regrets ever putting it in there. As for creating utility classes, well, those are still utility classes. If you do semantic classes then you are fighting against the philosophy of Tailwind as detailed in the Refactoring UI book.

> Note that the Tailwind team strongly anti-recommends @apply and regrets ever putting it in there

Please link to something that supports this claim, because it's not the first time I've seen it made on HN, but only found it on HN

I think "regrets putting it in there" is a bit strong - I'd be interested in a quote.

That said, the documentation does lean heavily away from @apply:

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/reusing-styles#extracting-class...

> If you’re going to use @apply, use it for very small, highly reusable things like buttons and form controls — and even then only if you’re not using a framework like React where a component would be a better choice.

Personally I think @apply is a useful tool - and I'm not sold on it being always evil.

It's accurate. Here you go: https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1559250403547652097?la...

https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1226511611592085504?la...

https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1296770370209566720?la...

The most authoritative form of documentation that part of a system is considered a serious design flaw and should not be used in new code, is on xitter?

I'm sure new users of the system will find that. Great job everyone.

FFS

There is a Twitter post saying putting it in was a mistaken and that he wouldn't do it again. https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1559250403547652097

Exactly. It's the frameworks driving the abuse.

I actually think CSS is the wrong tool for modern webdev. Or rather, it should be the output of a compile process instead of something that designers and developers wrestle with.

In general, we're building these complex SPAs, and still working directly in standards that were intended for a static document model. Part of the reason is we somehow believe we need infinite customizability, so for that we're writing in Assembly.

But, the truth is that user interfaces are largely consistent and should be. Still, even if we did want maximal customizability, we should use tooling that generates the CSS, etc.

And that tooling should be visual. I mean think about the fact that we're trying to hand code visual designs with text. Or that it was so accepted that we're only recently trying to generate the code from design tools like Figma, which is still imperfect.

So many thousands of developer hours lost to this effort. Bass-ackwards to be sure.

Maybe it is the properties that are good and the selectors that are bad. One could point to a trend in the last 15 years of HTML and CSS being tuned up as an application platform.

I'd point out the grid layout and flexbox as being features ideal for application work and https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110405/forms.html#form... is practically a love letter for applications.

Agreed on grid layout and flexbox. Took them a while to "fully" land, but now that they're here, they also represent a good model for visual design tools to work with as output.

> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.

I feel the same. Give the component a class and then in the SCSS assign the setting there. But inlining each individual CSS setting? I don't get it. Sure maybe great for a quick prototype / MVP. But as a permanent tool? I don't see it.

This mindset is the problem. You don't want or need this abstraction in the CSS, what you want is to encapsulate these styles properties in a reusable "HTML component", and then use that component wherever needed. It then carries those style properties into every instantiation. What use are semantic style classes in this context? Atomic CSS makes perfect sense in this context and makes composable development a breeze by comparison.

> Atomic CSS makes perfect sense in this context and makes composable development a breeze by comparison.

I should have also mentioned that your "semantic CSS" is necessarily anti-composable by contrast. Any reusable HTML components with semantic classes now require you to manually lift their CSS definitions into your CSS top-level context, which is a step that isn't required with atomic CSS / tailwind.

What happens when you move on to the next project—which may have a completely different design motif—and you want to reuse those components? Do you have to restyle each component independently?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com