This study compares two websites with similar design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS.
This study compares two websites with similar design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS.
Having used it in a major project its a shame that its so inefficient because the user experience really is much much better. It feels like a successor language to CSS because it fixed lots of unobvious and badly named attributes and makes lots of things just easier.
The code is more verbose but also you can completely understand how the page will look just by reading the html.
That said it makes sense the performance is so much worse, where you would have matched on one class for N styles you now match on N classes for N styles.
Theoretically its totally possible to do that matching at compile time and ‘compile’ the string of classes you wrote into individual ones per element for each combination used in the html though.
You lose being able to read meaning and structure though, and you also lose technical accessibility.
I like to add css hacks to websites. But I can’t if they don’t have useful, identifying, and stable selectors.
not really if you use a web framework and actually separate different things into their own components.
but yeah mixing non tailwind css into a tailwind project after the fact would be gross and hard.
It seems that we’ll get up to 10x soeedups with v4: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwindcss-v4-alpha
The performance improvements in v4 are for compilation times, not rendering.
Tailwind is only feels like a successor to CSS to developers writing css like it was 10 years ago (or using frameworks that write it like that, e.g. bootstrap), or projects not using visual regression testing.
Modern css is so much better.
:has(),+,~,nth-..., … selectors.If you’re using something like BEM, or bootstrap to make columns, your knowledge is way out of date and you’re doing it wrong.