Luke Janssen

Embedded Systems

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Tailwind is a Leaky Abstraction. It's essentially a small language you write in the class attributes of your HTML that compiles to a combination of CSS rules and selectors. Tailwind only supports the unadorned, which uses the Z axis.

Tailwind is a Leaky Abstraction

That’s interesting, because I was also sceptical about Tailwind initially. And it took me some time to start thinking in terms of utility classes. But then I just fell in love with Tailwind - mental model that I have at the moment is “Better DX for CSS”
Points from the article are fair, but you’re not going to face them that much when doing styling, so cannot say that they produce a lot of overhead

For me, the deal-breaker is I can avoid naming classes. Also tailwind lets me create a design system pretty easily. I think tailwind or this type of utility css libraries are best suited for app UI where components are likely to share same design language/pattern. For creative website UI, tailwind doesn’t help much because there are lots of different and custom designs to build.

Lame article from someone who clearly doesn’t understand Tailwind and try to dismiss the entire thing. The examples are obviously edge cases that happens rare enough that creating a plugin or using arbitrary variants to accomplish is more than enough.
In the real world we are using component based frameworks and Tailwind is the very best we can get to build a design system and quick deploy an unique looking and performant web app. If you want to orchestrate good animations and user interactions framer motion is here for it and it works nicely with Tailwind. CSS is great and everyone should learn, but Tailwind is such a thin layer over it that you end up learning more and more about CSS, its very far from the abstraction the author wanted it to be.

I mean, dude, I feel this is too corner case. Like, everything. No one said tailwind was easier than css, the rotate is corner case totally, you just use normal css for that specific things.
Tailwind is just an improvement for some things, not for everything.

I totally agree on every point 👍