As someone who writes a lot of CSS, and actually like CSS (yeah, unheard of, I know; I'm some alien), Tailwind doesn't just seem like it's reinventing the wheel and wrapping over an existing language, which is weird when you think about those two being mentioned together, is also bad for other reasons:

UserCSS becomes near impossible to use
Web scraping becomes a gigantic mess; LLMs become the only viable solution, and let's not even get started on how crazy that sounds
Semantic HTML becomes difficult to verify and build upon due to the sheer amouns of TEXT (and if you go "But you can put your most commonly used declarations together in a class selector and use that!" then congratulations you almost just wrote CSS), and in relation to this...
It encourages bad CSS practices and thus bad HTML practices, as if the terrible walls of text isn't already difficult to debug when working for accessibility
RIP traditional SEO, and thus RIP any small players who want to create and maintain their own search engine, and only large companies with a lot of resources can hire people to spend a fuck ton of time to scrape and index the web. SEO already has a ton of problems as it were, and Tailwind just adds a new dimension to the problem.

If the web industry as a whole could slow down and learn to live with the cascade (seriously, the cascade is your friend!), and stop demanding that we do CSS without the C, that'd be great.

Thanks for walking pass me standing on my soapbox that virtually nobody cares about.

[–] Hippy@piefed.social 6 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Maybe I'm old, but I completely agree with you. There is a natural tendency to try reinvent something when you don't understand it enough to be comfortable with it. Then that new thing lacks the maturity and scrutiny that the old thing went through to survive the test of time. This is basically how overconfident tech bros are transforming the web.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (5 children)

There is a natural tendency to try reinvent something when you don’t understand it enough to be comfortable with it. Then that new thing lacks the maturity and scrutiny that the old thing went through to survive the test of time.

While this is something that does happen, there's also a tendency for people in the industry to dismiss new things without actually looking into the pros and cons.

Doesn't it give you pause that many very experienced Frontend & CSS developers see objective advantages in Tailwinds utility class approach? Of course there are also objective disadvantages, don't get me wrong. But that means that these tools should be used whenever their advantages can shine and their disadvantages don't cause issues.

Any developer that can't clearly name the issues with regular CSS that Tailwind attempts to solve either hasn't been developing long enough to encounter these issues, or hasn't actually tried to understand what Tailwind is.

[–] felbane@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

utility classes are just a small step away from style attributes

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago

See, that's a great example of a critique that nobody with professional experience would make.

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