There's a worrying trend in modern web development, where developers are throwing away decades of carefully wrought systems for a bit of perceived convenience. Tools such as Tailwind CSS seem to be spreading like wildfire, with very few people ever willing to acknowledge the regression they bring to our field. And I'm getting tired of it
While I understand the idea behind using CSS “correctly”, I have, in my 15 years of professional experience, never ever seen even one project where the hypothetical promises of CSS were actually realized. It ALWAYS ends up with a fuckton of importants, or hunting for ages for the one class fifteen levels of abstraction up that changes your one element, coming up with more and more absurd class names, until they are literally no different from just some random name. Tailwind might seem horrible in a theoretical sense, but in an actually using it sense it’s a heaven sent. I want to change the padding on THIS ONE SINGLE ELEMENT, I change it EXACTLY RIGHT THERE where the element is defined, and i can be absolutely sure that I haven’t accidentally cascaded someone else’s work to death.
#CSS, in practice, is the insane idea of every single element on your website sharing global, mutable state, and thinking that’s in anyway smart.
While I understand the idea behind using CSS “correctly”, I have, in my 15 years of professional experience, never ever seen even one project where the hypothetical promises of CSS were actually realized. It ALWAYS ends up with a fuckton of importants, or hunting for ages for the one class fifteen levels of abstraction up that changes your one element, coming up with more and more absurd class names, until they are literally no different from just some random name. Tailwind might seem horrible in a theoretical sense, but in an actually using it sense it’s a heaven sent. I want to change the padding on THIS ONE SINGLE ELEMENT, I change it EXACTLY RIGHT THERE where the element is defined, and i can be absolutely sure that I haven’t accidentally cascaded someone else’s work to death.
#CSS, in practice, is the insane idea of every single element on your website sharing global, mutable state, and thinking that’s in anyway smart.