Tailwind CSS, and the death of web craftsmanship (pdx.su)

submitted 1 year ago by Paradox to c/programming@beehaw.org

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[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Then again, some people might think the obfuscation in 20+ classes is somehow a good thing…

I'd argue that CSS is itself an obfuscation (read: abstraction), and isn't even implemented consistently across browsers. If the abstraction results in less duplication, more consistency across the website, and higher productivity, then I don't think that's a bad thing. (Of course, the flip side is that if using the abstraction results in the same learning curve with less transparency, then the benefits might not outweigh the cost.)

Having never used tailwind, I can't give a personal opinion on that, but I find it hard to work on any decently sized project without SCSS. Sure I can write pure CSS, but SCSS provides so many QoL features over raw CSS that it's hard to pass it up, and it's easy enough to get setup.

[-] Paradox 3 points 1 year ago

I mentioned some of this in another comment in this thread[^1], but CSS has gotten tremendously better since Sass was first introduced in the 00s. Many features we used are now native to CSS, and can be used in your browser, today. Some of them are even better than their sass variants, or at least have special abilities sass doesn't. calc() comes to mind, as it can mix and match units in a way a preprocessor just cant. You can do calc(100% - 10px), which is good for all sorts of stupid corner cases.

And native CSS nesting is basically 1:1 with how Sass does it:

.parent {
  font-weight: 600;

  &amp;:hover {
    background: purple;
  }

  .child {
    font-weight: 900;
  }

  @media screen and (max-width: 800px) {
    display: none;
  }
}

I still use Sass or Stylus[^2] on virtually all of my projects, but its nice to not have to when you just need to get something out or write a userstyle or something.

[^1]: Not sure how to provide an instance agnostic link, the few things I've seen people attempt didn't work, but here's the lemdro.id link [^2]: I'm largely giving up on Stylus, its sadly unmaintained. My favorite preprocessor though; takes .sass (indented) style to a whole new level on what you can omit

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Wait CSS supports nesting? Since when?

Also, SASS's mixins, variables (CSS has variables too but they work differently), and many of the other features are hard to beat, which is why I feel like it's almost never a negative to get it up and running on any project I work on (unless the project is a tiny one-off, then it's probably not worth it). One thing I like is that it's close to CSS - increasing the transparency - while still providing abstractions that let you save time and increase consistency across the project.

[-] Paradox 2 points 1 year ago

Landed earlier this year :D

I used to really use mixins a ton, but these days I haven't really written any in a good long time. Still useful, still something plain-ol-css can't do, but I've found autoprefixer has managed to handle most of my mixin needs.

this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023

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