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
I think the article fails to mention that one of the reasons tools like Tailwind (and methodologies like BEM, etc.) exist in the first place is to facilitate bigger organisation sites.
In my personal experience “plain old CSS” isn’t feasible as the number of mainterners on a site goes up. Once there is multiple teams (possibly even across multiple departments) contributing to a site, the cascading part of CSS means that it is more or less unavoidable that some change from one team unintentionally breaks something for another team - and this being visual things means that it is very hard to catch with automated tests.
After having working in a big organisation for a while, most developers will eventually start wishing for something that would make sure that their CSS only applies to their own components. div tags with inline style attributes suddenly starts to look very attractive - which is what eventually led to something like Tailwind.
I think the article fails to mention that one of the reasons tools like Tailwind (and methodologies like BEM, etc.) exist in the first place is to facilitate bigger organisation sites.
In my personal experience “plain old CSS” isn’t feasible as the number of mainterners on a site goes up. Once there is multiple teams (possibly even across multiple departments) contributing to a site, the cascading part of CSS means that it is more or less unavoidable that some change from one team unintentionally breaks something for another team - and this being visual things means that it is very hard to catch with automated tests.
After having working in a big organisation for a while, most developers will eventually start wishing for something that would make sure that their CSS only applies to their own components.
divtags with inline style attributes suddenly starts to look very attractive - which is what eventually led to something like Tailwind.