Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Julia Evans shares her experience migrating personal sites from Tailwind CSS to vanilla CSS with semantic HTML. She outlines the CSS organization system she developed, covering nine areas: CSS reset (copied from Tailwind's preflight), component-based structure with scoped files, color palette via CSS variables, font size scale mirroring Tailwind's naming, utility classes, minimal base styles, spacing strategies using lobotomized owl selectors, responsive design with CSS Grid and auto-fit instead of media queries, and esbuild for production bundling. She explains why she left Tailwind — build system dependency, 2.8MB unoptimized CSS files, improved CSS skills, and desire for more flexibility — while acknowledging Tailwind taught her valuable structuring concepts she now replicates in vanilla CSS.