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
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.
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:
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.
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↩︎
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 ↩︎
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.
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 docalc(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; &: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.
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 ↩︎
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 ↩︎