Exposing Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine

[tipiirai]

Please check out perhaps the most important content piece I've ever written:

Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine

[tipiirai]

Done. Thanks!

[felix-bohlin]

First of all, thanks for a very interesting read. I have some thoughts though.

I haven't gotten the impression that the Tailwind team's intentions are ill-willed and cash grabby. My take on it is that there's this camp of people that aren't as proficient in CSS and/or think writing CSS is the worst, and TW is primarily catered towards them or at least has gotten a lot of traction with those devs. They've probably been shielded from writing CSS before, but now that every company seemingly prefers to hire fullstack over BE/FE devs they can't get away anymore.

For them, CSS has just been this weird thing full of clearfixes, floats and seemingly contradictory properties that "don't add any new features apart from changing background color". On top of that it's another mental model! Then TW comes along, and I totally get it - as you said - writing it with HMR feels fast and satisfying, it holds your hand along the way with its IDE plugin and gorgeous documentation. When has CSS ever done that for you (rethorical question)?

Catalyst UI - yeah it's not beautiful but if you're writing React and don't pick MUI as your component library you have a harder time recruiting. CUI with the weight of TW behind it is going head-to-head with MUI, leaning even heavier into the arms of those fullstack devs, getting them to style components without writing much CSS.

For all the downsides of TW, I don't view see it as a machine to lock people in to squeeze them for money. I'm not saying this approach is good or bad, but I feel they're trying to solve a systemic problem more than anything else. Devs are expected to do everything now in half the time. Along comes TW, you're given a hammer and you're being told every problem is a nail - who wouldn't love that?

It's not all bad though and as people have mentioned before in this repo - Anthony Fu's UnoCSS has come along as a great middleground with a little bit of everything baked in. In my opinion, TW is most of all a beginning of a broader conversation, and who knows - maybe your upcoming CSS solution will have a say too? 🙂

[tipiirai]

The problem is the "Best practices don't actually work" gospel which should have been "The best practices did not work for me" — just like the shitting part. It's the reason you are indirectly promoting their inline styling with phrases like " they're trying to solve a systemic problem". It's the reason we're having this conversation in the first place because he managed to change the prevailing practices for so many people.

It's the reason I'm having a hard time talking about the standard MDN practices in vanilla CSS, like cascading, nesting, and all the cool new stuff that is on the specification.

You see, the best practices have always worked for me. And I've never been on the card--blue side of things.

[felix-bohlin]

Thanks for clarifying that, I hear you!

The interesting question then is: what's the timeline here? When did we go wrong? What problems did we try to solve, or what chain of events lead to this gradual shift away from best practices?

Thanks for taking your time and chat a bit. Appreciate it.

[tipiirai]

Nice!

I don't have all the answers, but I see that the turning point was when Facebook announced how they solved all their issues on their design system by switching from a PHP to a more advanced JavaScript setup. Namely global namespace pollution and dead code elimination.

Developers accepted the new norm: "global namespace is the root of all evil", and rushed implementing different kinds of CSS-in-JS solutions.

At the same time we forgot the fundamental principle of contemporary design: Form follows Function. You should build components based on their purpose, and not how they look. This principle has many forms including separation of concerns, or decoupled design, or the famous one from Steve Jobs "It's not how it looks, it's how it works".

For example: you have a table component, whose purpose is to show tabular data. On your front page, it may take a promotional form, but on the documentation area the purpose is to teach and educate — thus clarity is more important than the WOW effect. The same goes for other components, like tabbed interfaces or feedback forms. You get the idea.

Now, when styling is jammed to the structure, you have a more or less hardcoded look & feel. And you need to create a new component to adapt the purpose. One good example is Catalyst and its many forms of the paragraph tag: Text, Description, DialogDescription, and AlertDescription. In an attempt to increase reusability, they reduced it.

Summary: By solving a theoretical global namespace issue, we ended up breaking a fundamental design practice: Form follows function.

[scythewyvern]

what do you think a bad design can lead bad css?

i mean sometimes with a good design you can organise you styles with pleasure but sometimes bad design don't let you any chance.

so, should design go with development or development should figure out how to implement things in a better way?

[tipiirai]

I think the relationship between design and development is crucial and they both should go hand in hand. I think an easy-to-use design system helps both parties tremendously here, which is my next development focus. I'm planning to release a solid alternative to CSS-in-JS and Tailwind that helps you keep things in order. Hopefully out next month.

[felix-bohlin]

How are your blog analytics @tipiirai? Let's see if your article gets mentioned in a couple of hours 😉

[felix-bohlin]

Yup, you're featured at 4:22:38.

[tipiirai]

Let me guess before I click on it. Everyone in the discussion, including the host is a Tailwind user/convert — so the discussion is about this "crazy argument" that I made.. Hope I'm wrong.. clicking now

[tipiirai]

Okay. 30 seconds was enough to see that the guy had picked up his side before reading the article. Even the beginning of the article, which explains how Tailwind got started by the words of Adam was a wrong take. Not hard to imagine how the rest of the critique goes.

[joshamaju]

One good rule of thumb "never listen to Theo". And it's weird he thought the article was about him

[tipiirai]

Indeed. Just watched this video about him. Pretty alarming.

it's weird he thought the article was about him

Oh, wow. Haven't watched the video, but I'm not surprised.