Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ookblah | Hacker News Reader

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mobile selectors, "group" selectors, hover styles... the list goes on and on. like all things, it depends on how your workflow. if you have a super defined hierarchy and naming scheme you can reference then sure, centralize all your CSS. if you have many components and multiple people working on them sometimes it's better to separate everything out and enforce with a guide.

i can't tell you how frustrating it is to open a component and have no idea what you're looking at because you worked on the thing months ago, or you change one thing in your centralized CSS and have no idea what the side effect are. with tailwind i can see exactly the styles i'm looking for.

FOR ME, works better to have a core style file and then move everything to something like tailwind per component for maintenance.

tired of seeing the same simplistic arguments against utility frameworks. if you can't see the merits of it then you obviously aren't working on projects that need that, but don't criticize it blindly. it's not for lack of CSS knowledge.

The thing is, when you are doing CSS properly, you will "anchor" your selectors appropriately. What I mean is the following: Ltes say you got some "component" or whatever you want to call it, and have a button in it, that is special in some way. Of course you are not gonna write "button a {someproperty: specialvalue}". You should be writing the selector as specific for that component in this case, for example "my-special-component button a {...}". If the design is implemented thoughtfully, then most of the problems people claim to have with CSS are simply non-existent.

Like "side-effect" you mention. That can only happen, if the design is implemented reusing parts of other design definitions, where they are not meant to be reused. Any other side effect would be intentional. For example button text color and paragraph text color. If one wants them both to change, when one of them is changed, then one reuses the style definition, but probably in most cases one does not, and therefore has separate definitions and therefore has no silly side effects, even after a few months not looking at the project.

yeah i'm just tired of making the same argument over and over. for what it's worth i've been doing CSS "properly" since the time when that site was a thing.

back in the backbone days, now vue/react and before tailwind this is EXACTLY what we did, scope the styles down to the component, then layer it on top of the global styles. so sure, .my-selector a is specific to that component.

the "side effect" happens when your app starts to span 100s of components and you need slight variations for everything. you're telling me you can assure me that none of your master global classes contain any design definitions that could not possibly be reused? i'm calling bullshit. it's like saying your backend 100% never has any duplicated functions.

so with that out of the way, let's say you do get your global styles like 90% of the way there. so in each component you scoped it down. now lets say for one button you had to adjust the margin a bit, or another the styling is somewhat diff. multiply this by 100s of different components.

tell me now how me opening a file, seeing "button variation-class-1 variation-class-2", then going down into the component <style> section and looking up exactly what the variation and what properties were used is in anyway "better" than just seeing some super powered inline style directly in the button. it's the same complexity and now you've gotten rid of the prime benefit of CSS hierarchy and split the "style and structure" in just one independent component.

at some point you can't possibly create the number variations you need and you can't extract out "reusable" parts. maybe you have 5 buttons and only 2 need the 20px margin. do you create a "button 20px" class and do that in each component? no. at some point you will just inline it because it's easy, or you will create your utility class except it will be worse than tailwind.

Or you can just just ".special-component .button" selector adapting the selector to be more specific as needed. Most code reuse in CSS is bad, because they break when the design changes. You don't DRY just because the code are the same.

yeah and when you do that for 100s of components i'd rather just see a utility class on the button itself vs hunting down its meaning in the related section of the component.

this is exactly the shit i was annoyed by when scaling, having to scope a .my-component-X section for literally every component and then grokking it later. you're basically taking the worst part of CSS (hunting down the meaning of a selector) and duplicating it for every component.

now maybe you say name it better or more semantically? congrats you recreated BEM lol. literally all the arguments used against it are purists for purity sake or thinking people haven't gone through this same thought exercise.

just use whatever is best for the task. i still use css the "traditional" way.

/rant

Why the hyperbolic about 100s of components? Because if that exists somewhere, then it's just plain bad design to me.

Let's say you writing templates for a website and you have a partial named "main-navbar", it has a search input field that looks like the other input, but needs some alteration. Are you going to name all these alteration like "margin-x-2px", "font-small". Or just add a new style block with ".main-navbar .search-input" as the selector.

> you're basically taking the worst part of CSS (hunting down the meaning of a selector) and duplicating it for every component.

Why are you hunting it down? If I need to find the styles that are applied to an element, I just open the web inspector. More often than not, from bottom to top, it's the reset style, the component style, the variant style, and the styles derived from its relation with its parent and siblings.

With tailwind

  <div class="mx-auto flex max-w-sm items-center gap-x-4 rounded-xl bg-white p-6 shadow-lg outline outline-black/5 dark:bg-slate-800 dark:shadow-none dark:-outline-offset-1 dark:outline-white/10">
    <img class="size-12 shrink-0" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" />
    <div>
      <div class="text-xl font-medium text-black dark:text-white">ChitChat</div>
      <p class="text-gray-500 dark:text-gray-400">You have a new message!</p>
    </div>
  </div>

With "traditional css"

  <div class="alert">
    <img class="alert-icon" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" />
    <div>
      <div class="alert-title">ChitChat</div>
      <p class="alert-message">You have a new message!</p>
    </div>
  </div>

I would add, that usually also I would not hunt things down, because I put styling for a navigation into a stylesheet file called "navigation.css". Not much hunting to do there. Sounds crazy, but actually works.

You don't need the classes on the alert sub-elements:

  <div class="alert">
    <img src="/img/logo.svg" alt="ChitChat Logo" />
    <div>
      <h2>ChitChat</h2>
      <p>You have a new message!</p>
    </div>
  </div>

Then the CSS is just:

  .alert {...}
  .alert img {...}
  .alert h2  {...}
  .alert p   {...}

You can probably also get rid of the nested div by using flex, floats, or margins.

every page in our app is a "component" which could have many sub components, some reused. i think it's actually very common in large scale apps so maybe we're not even starting on the same foot.

would you not consider opening the web inspector "hunting down" when i can just understand the full thing just by looking at the element itself? to your example, let's say now you want to put your search bar next to another item, but that item requires that there be 4rem right margin. Then you put your search bar next to another item in another component that requires 8rem top margin. this starts breaking down at scale. in the past we would just inline the margin value. eventually this moved to basic utility classes which evolved into tailwind.

and with your code, you've just proved my point. i find tailwind overly verbose (necessary evil), but honestly i don't even need to open the "inspector" to understand how this will look. you can give me that 12 months from now and i can understand exactly what it is in 10 seconds. with "alert" i have to referencing something else. and this is just a handful of lines, imagine if your component is larger than that. it's also a bad example because i will just eventually roll the styles for "alert" into its own class if it makes sense. get the best of both worlds.

again, i challenge you to just consider that a lot of other people as smart as you have thought through these issues and made the according trade-offs. the example you're giving is just way too simplistic and pretty much like every example someone gives in these threads.

> the "side effect" happens when your app starts to span 100s of components and you need slight variations for everything. you're telling me you can assure me that none of your master global classes contain any design definitions that could not possibly be reused? i'm calling bullshit. it's like saying your backend 100% never has any duplicated functions.

At that point the design department of your business has failed its job. Case closed. If everything is slightly varied, then there is no coherent design. Not even my backend-dev developed "designs" are that bad.

> tell me now how me opening a file, seeing "button variation-class-1 variation-class-2", then going down into the component <style> section and looking up exactly what the variation and what properties were used is in anyway "better" than just seeing some super powered inline style directly in the button. it's the same complexity and now you've gotten rid of the prime benefit of CSS hierarchy and split the "style and structure" in just one independent component.

I also care about what soup I deliver to any visiting browser. So I care about not having a thousand repeated inline styles, that make it harder to write user CSS for example. Visitors of my site can very easily adapt the styling, by simply changing the styling of 1 class or even 1 CSS variable that I defined in a theme.css.

But you are also making a general mistake. You are letting perfect be the enemy of good. Even if one only succeeds 90% at what I described, this is still great and simple to maintain in 90% of the cases. I doubt tailwind is a big win over that.

you know, maybe understand actual frontend dev issues more deeply before arguing against toolsets you are unfamiliar with. none of your suggestions/generalizations actually address my actual real world issues and rather they are non-issues in modern dev.

the type of apps i'm talking about aren't just a "theme.css", so whatever mythical large app you're talking about that adheres to this rigid css standard while being easy to maintain i'm ready to be proven wrong lol.

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