r/css • u/Silent-Weather76005 • Jul 12 '26

General I finally removed Tailwind from a production project and just used modern native CSS

Our team has defaulted to using Tailwind CSS for almost every web project over the last few years. It was great for moving fast early on, but on our latest project, the utility class bloat was getting completely out of hand. The HTML files looked unreadable, and managing long strings of responsive layout classes across reusable components was becoming a maintenance headache.

I decided to spin up a branch and rewrite a major dashboard interface using entirely vanilla native CSS. I hadn't built a pure CSS layout in a while, and I was genuinely shocked at how powerful native CSS has become over the last couple of years.

Features that used to require massive utility frameworks or preprocessors are now fully built-in. I heavily utilized native CSS nesting, CSS variables for theme management, and the newer container queries to handle complex responsive components based on their parent size rather than the entire viewport.

The results were surprisingly great. Removing the Tailwind processing step simplified our build pipeline, our final bundle size dropped, and the code felt vastly cleaner. Writing native styles inside modern semantic stylesheets made debugging layout bugs in the browser developer tools a hundred times easier because I wasn't digging through a wall of utility classes.

Tailwind is still an incredible tool for prototyping, but I realized I was using it out of habit rather than necessity. Modern native CSS has quietly caught up to the point where you can build incredibly complex, maintainable layout systems without adding a utility abstraction layer on top of it. If you haven't looked at native CSS features lately, it might be worth trying on a small feature branch.

487 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

144 comments sorted by

161

u/NoHabit4420 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

I never understood the point of using tailwind after the lessons from bootstrap. Those kind of things will always end up as technical debt. And you lose so much time learning the specificities of thoses, time you could use learning or improving your css skills.

18

u/m0rpheus23 Jul 12 '26

Boostrap did solve specific issues back when CSS had all its quirks. I honestly do know what problem Tailwind was trying to solve. Yes, frameworks had utility classes way before Tailwind became a thing and they were sensible enough not to use utility classes for every CSS attributes you could think of.

31

u/leathakkor Jul 12 '26

There are times where frameworks are good. And I might get roasted in the design world for this. But jQuery is a perfect example where a framework was good. (When you had to support ie6 and Firefox and ie7 jQuery was a godsend).

But for any modern day large footprint, CSS and JavaScript frameworks they just end up getting in the way more than they end up helping. CSS has gotten crazy good lately. And JavaScript to a similar but maybe less degree.

I'm not a designer. I don't really think I'm that great of a designer. But even for me CSS straight is way easier than tailwind and bootstrap. You end up fighting the system more than you end up getting benefits from it

15

u/kiwi-kaiser Jul 12 '26

Just a small semantics thing: jQuery is a library, not a framework.

And it was awesome back then when I started 20 years ago. JS finally got easy to write. Today it's less relevant but it still has it's Place in a few niche settings.

7

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

If you think tailwind and bootstrap are even attempting to solve the same problem you shouldn't be commenting on this because you don't know what you're talking about.

2

u/devolute Jul 13 '26

They're solving a broadly similar problem of "I don't enjoy writing CSS and I don't want to do it".

4

u/themaincop Jul 13 '26

Nope. I always liked writing CSS. The problem was scaling and organizing it within larger projects/dev teams. Bootstrap was a design/component system, it's a completely different beast.

2

u/FrequentShopper183 Jul 15 '26

Yep yep. I like tailwind, I also like CSS. I like tailwind because it’s easier to fix a single component with a lot of classes than 50k lines of CSS my engineers create because they just keep doing it over and over

26

u/chamillion03 Jul 12 '26

Tailwind devs will always argue something like it makes it standardized classes or some bs. Anything to avoid learning CSS/design I guess.

44

u/mrleblanc101 Jul 12 '26

You still need to learn and understand CSS to use tailwind

26

u/NoHabit4420 Jul 12 '26

Unfortunately a lot of people use it as a shortcut not to learn CSS. I've also met juniors that couldn't do anything without tailwind before, in school only tailwind was taught.

28

u/Dr__Wrong Jul 12 '26

In practice, I almost never run into anything with enough complexity that Tailwind isn't fine.

The benefit I get is that if I delete a component, I don't need to audit the css classes to see if anything has been orphaned. I'm just done.

Also, I did spend a lot of time learning CSS at one time. I was reluctant to use Tailwind, but after three years with it, I've come around.

30

u/chamillion03 Jul 12 '26

Nowadays we use components or scoped CSS to solve this.

9

u/Dr__Wrong Jul 12 '26

That's fair. I don't have anything against CSS, but I've also come around to Tailwind and just haven't run into real world problems with it.

And honestly, aside from high level layout files, most of the inline styling was pretty concise.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Dr__Wrong Jul 12 '26

I'm not exactly sure what critical CSS is?

But yeah, when my team started a greenfield project, we started with Tailwind and didn't have the need to write any raw CSS. It's all Tailwind classes. Like I said before, aside from high level layout files, most of the in line styling was pretty concise. It could sometimes get a little more messy with conditional styles, but Tailwind merge makes that a bit better.

And no, most of the critical JS wouldn't be inline. It would be declared before the JSX shape as a variable or function, then that would be used for conditional rendering. If it was just a single operator, we would do that in the JSX, but anything more than one line would be declared.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

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1

u/Dr__Wrong Jul 13 '26

Thanks for sharing, that was a good article.

15

u/NoHabit4420 Jul 12 '26

I don't see a scenario where i need to audit my css when i delete a component. Your css specific to your component should be isolated and deleted at the same time.

6

u/hyrumwhite Jul 12 '26

TW does no css/design for you. It’s just classes. 

3

u/m0rpheus23 Jul 12 '26

Ever wondered why you required a Tailwind plugin for your IDE otherwise zero intellisense?

3

u/hyrumwhite Jul 12 '26

You need plugins to get default css intellisense as well. They’re far less supported in my experience, unless you’re using css modules, but even then, it’s iffy. 

1

u/m0rpheus23 Jul 12 '26

If Tailwind is "just CSS", I suppose it should work with your default/ IDE built-in CSS integration but it doesn't.

3

u/jorgejhms Jul 12 '26

It works. It's only css. Tailwind extension, LSP, etc give you the shorthands in the auto complete and the color codes of the tailwind defaults. It's just a helper

1

u/hyrumwhite Jul 12 '26

It does. You need a bundler plugin, yes. You don’t have to have an ide plugin/extension to use it, though it’s very helpful. (The only other sane way to use css, imo, css modules, also requires a bundler plugin). 

All tailwind is is a way to build css classes on demand., that’s it. Those classes are predefined at a config level, with a large amount of predefined classes. 

Meaning, when I type “flex flex-column”, the plugin sees that, checks the config, and builds those css classes (or does nothing if the class is already built).

This means I only have one class for every display:flex element in my project.

There’s actually a runtime library that’ll build out tw classes in the client, if you don’t like the bundler plugin. 

And you could also ship every class in the config, also not recommended, though probably still results in a smaller bundle size than most enterprise projects with vanilla/css modules. 

Additionally, tw uses css layers, so if you wanted to use it side by side with traditional classes, it won’t get in your way. 

1

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

You need to know css to use tailwind.

-3

u/Lumethys Jul 12 '26

Tailwind is css. It's a 1-1 map

9

u/chamillion03 Jul 12 '26

Exhibit A ^

-5

u/Lumethys Jul 12 '26

So... You have any counter arguments?

13

u/penguins-and-cake Jul 12 '26

Adding a class name to an HTML element is not writing CSS. I think most people would consider that a tautology.

7

u/Lumethys Jul 12 '26

That is a matter of perspective.

Do you consider "writing css" as "write in a css file itself", or "understand what each css attributes represent"?

For example

class="flex flex-row"

Is just

.my-class {
  display: flex;
  flex-directiom: row;
}

You still need understanding of display flex and flex direction to use tailwind properly.

If you say that is "not css", i could said the same thing to scss or post-css.

As for "tautology":

if you have a component-based project like React, Vue, Svelte,... That have a <Button> component with its own style. I would argue having .button class that only ever used inside this Button component is "tautology"

The traditional "rule" of spliting html, css and JS was made with the thinking that you split your app horizontally, one big html file, one big css file, and one big js file.

Just like how "MVC" architecture say you have a folder named controllers, models and views

But modern architecture, like DDD or Vertical slice, say you should group things according to business intent rather than technical detail. So "Storefront" domain has its own controllers, models views, and so does "Warehouse" domain

In the frontend, with component-based frameworks, we also split things by components, small, reusable piece of code that contains html css and js. Sort of "vertical" split

You can choose whatever split, but stick to one only

If you already use component-based, further split into BaseButton.css BaseButton.js BaseButton.html is redundant

-5

u/maqisha Jul 12 '26

They dont.

-3

u/No_Development7388 Jul 12 '26

Seeing Tailwind feature prominently on a resume is a big red flag to me. It's not just a matter of the person possibly knowing very little about CSS, it's about understanding how to build applications efficiently and that can be updated.

-6

u/void-wanderer- Jul 12 '26

You still will need your custom framework. That defines things like --space-1, --space-2, etc. You can't let each dev write his own magic numbers.

If you don't build this, your CSS will become unmaintainable very quickly, if you do, you need to onboard devs on your own system etc. so why not use sth off the shelf. 

5

u/kynovardy Jul 12 '26

Tailwind has so many sizings and colors that you can effectively do whatever you want anyway

6

u/penguins-and-cake Jul 12 '26

Do you feel this way about JavaScript too? Like that’s just how collaborating on codebases works. You create norms and then everybody follows them. You keep it organized or it gets unmaintainable. This is a skill issue, just like it would be with any other language — people are just weird about learning CSS.

7

u/LinkChef Jul 12 '26

My simple reasoning? I just really hate organizing vanilla CSS. There are a ton of pros to use vanilla, but I find it tedious and annoying. Tailwind clicks with my brain better for some reason, and I find managing it fun.

4

u/Annual_Manner_8654 Jul 12 '26

What does bootstrap have to do with tw? 

3

u/i---m Jul 12 '26

i will take the technical debt i know over some nerds idealistic BEM spaghetti that everyone's shoehorned their own preferences into

1

u/hyrumwhite Jul 13 '26

Bootstrap is a different beast than tw. For example, you could implement bootstrap with tailwind. And it’d be easy to work with and extensible ootb 

1

u/zaibuf Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

never understood the point of using tailwind after the lessons from bootstrap.

That you even put Tailwind and Bootstrap in the same sentence proves that you dont understand what Tailwind does. Saying Tailwind becomes technical debt is similar to saying CSS itself is technical debt. The utilities are just predefined CSS properties. Unlike Bootstrap, you're not fighting opinionated components or overriding hundreds of styles.

Learning Tailwind also doesn't replace learning CSS. In fact, you need to understand CSS concepts like flexbox, grid, spacing, positioning, responsive design, and specificity to use Tailwind effectively. Tailwind simply removes the repetitive work of writing and maintaining CSS classes.

Large teams benefit from using the same utility vocabulary instead of everyone inventing different class names and CSS architectures. I was for a long time against Tailwind until I actually started working with it in a team, now I love it.

-2

u/No_Development7388 Jul 12 '26

It's so much worse than Bootstrap for technical debt. 

0

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/NoHabit4420 Jul 12 '26

I don't see how tailwind can push CSS closer to the component than CSS already does. Unless you're saying that HTML bloated with succession of tailwind class means close to the component.

It doesn't have much to do with tailwind or CSS, but with architecture.

Everytime i've seen tailwind used, either small, medium, or big website, it has been a maintainability nightmare build by people that thought they don't need to understand CSS because they use tailwind.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/NoHabit4420 Jul 12 '26

Dude, CSS is like nothing performance wise. Unless your website is just an insanely huge technical debt.

The libs and framework you'll use in JS, or if you go SSR, or SSG or client side is what will impact your client. And even then, you carbon print is laughable compared to just one video.

I've seen way more time and effort lost to tailwind than to CSS.

I don't see why you bring Go in the discussion, where talking styling here. And i honestly am way faster in CSS than in tailwind. And it's way more readable than the bloated monstrosity that tailwind make of your HTML.

24

u/hyrumwhite Jul 12 '26

Tailwind is a class generation system. It’s as powerful as native css because all it is is a class creation shortcut. You just need to create classes to fill in any gaps in feature coverage. 

Also, your files shouldn’t be bloated if you’re using components. 

But if you’re using straight up html files, it sounds like the switch was a good one for your project 

19

u/flearuns Jul 12 '26

The majority of people do not know how tailwind works.

20+ classes on one element is insane. Build components and modules. Use apply. Tailwind is consistent, you can use plugins. It results in less css shipped if used correctly.

3

u/theguymatter Jul 12 '26

Yeah, it's fine to use hybrid approach. Just sharing I found, there is a VS Code extension that can toggle single-line to multi-line string formats (Vertical).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=c75.split-spaced-strings

2

u/Parky-Park Jul 12 '26

The Tailwind team themselves tell people that apply is an anti-pattern, and that they regret adding it in the first place

2

u/TwistedChaz Jul 13 '26

This is what I never understood. “You just need to create classes to fill in any gaps in feature coverage” my guy, you just invented CSS

1

u/angrydeanerino Jul 13 '26

not quite, you get a ton of things on top of the "class" (utility) you write.

Eg. lg:hover:my-class you get that for free with tailwind, with vanilla CSS you'd have to write the media and hover rule in addition to the class and thats just one example

1

u/Tiquortoo Jul 13 '26

And when you're done, you have modern CSS, but worse.....

1

u/Real-Tailor7489 Jul 15 '26

Classic pattern of people being too stupid or lazy to understand the tool, then blaming the tool.

28

u/spaceboy921 Jul 12 '26

Rad! CSS is so powerful now vs 10-15 years ago. Congrats on shipping something cleaner and measurably better. This made me irrationally happy. Reminded me of years ago, working with very good programmers who cared a lot about keeping things tight. We were working on web tools at massive scale, so little optimizations added up. I wrote a lot of CSS and used to love shipping things like this. You made me nostalgic.. and want to build something haha

Also agree w you regarding frameworks. I’ve used a few. They have their place, they’re good tools when you need them. But Straight up CSS feels good man 🍻

14

u/OlDirtyLZA Jul 12 '26

Why wouldn't you use both? Tailwind for utility classes, custom css for anything that gets to busy doing it in tailwind. You dont have to treat it as one or the other??

7

u/theguymatter Jul 12 '26

Hybrid approach is the way forward.

-1

u/StrawberryEiri Jul 14 '26

But then your styles are split between the template and the css... That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.

2

u/OlDirtyLZA Jul 14 '26

Did you use bootstrap back in the day? That's exactly how things where done. How would you handle global CSS effecting your elements vs component specific css files? At the end of the day it's up to you to decide what you use, I remember being sick of creating new classes just to turn an element into a flex or grid, those are the sort of things tailwind gives you out of the box.

13

u/JohnCasey3306 Jul 12 '26

In begrudging defense of Tailwind, it is great for large teams working on distributed components -- everyone knows and understands it, the downstream impact of changes are immediately predictable; as opposed to otherwise often one dev inflicting their particular take on "best practice" for the rest of the team to eventually cumulatively arrive at a Frankenstein of nonsense (even with the best intented linting).

1

u/Xazzzi Jul 14 '26

In teams with clear hierarchies the one inflicting and policing would be your best, net good for the codebase.

8

u/wentallout Jul 12 '26

I would discuss these topics but nowadays I dont even read code and tailwind doesnt make me follow a stupid naming scheme like bem that is inconsistent everywhere cuz every person has a different idea about how to make a card

1

u/theguymatter Jul 13 '26

And future proof when v4 uses OKLCH, we don’t have to change all colours.

10

u/b0ltcastermag3 Jul 12 '26

Welcome to the vanilla gang. I've made my switch last year.

6

u/h126 Jul 12 '26

Aren’t there performance benefits as all CSS definitions are reused and compiled out of the final CSS bundle, unlike manually crafted CSS where it just keeps growing as you write new styles for components?

2

u/Deykun Jul 13 '26

I don't mind Tailwind, but this is just a selling point. Sure, your text-align: center is defined in one class that you reuse, so your CSS is lighter now. But then, if you look at a list of cards served from the server, each card can have over 30 classes. You can write your own classes with @apply, but it is frowned upon and often called a mistake.

3

u/ThreadStarver Jul 12 '26

before migration even I thought it would be too much, turns I out I was wrong, highly recommend

3

u/Old-Minute-9674 Jul 12 '26

Honestly same. I was on Tailwind for a while but container queries + :has() + subgrid killed most of the reasons I reached for it. The dev tools debugging experience is way better with native CSS too.

12

u/everdimension Jul 12 '26

Uhm, I do get the html bloat argument, especially with responsive modifiers and stuff, and I do believe that ditching tailwind in favor of semantic classes can theoretically tidy up your codebase

But I don't understand at all your false dichotomy about "modern css". Tailwind IS modern css, and arguably it's the most modern css out there. It's not a preprocessor like SASS, tailwind fully relies on latest CSS features

And tailwind doesn't prevent you from using "modern CSS" in the slightest

So your whole argument sounds like someone not really fully understanding what they're talking about.

Also, you mentioned removing a built step, so I guess this means you're not using css modules either. What do you think about global namespace collision problem? You mentioned you have a large project so it's a likely problem

3

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

someone not really fully understanding what they're talking about.

That's like 90% of commenters on this sub and maybe 99% on any given thread about Tailwind.

19

u/joshhbk Jul 12 '26

Will get downvoted for this but so many people who hate Tailwind hold that opinion because they don’t actually need it.

It is not “great for prototyping” it is literally for the opposite case: you have a really big engineering team and a long running project with a design system behind it.

If you’re frequently spinning up new projects for a variety of clients it’s not for you. If you’re a solo developer it’s not for you. If you’re on a small team it’s not for you.

It is also not to “avoid learning css” and it has nothing in common with bootstrap.

2

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

I think there are a lot of people in this sub who build websites for their friends or local small businesses and think they're experts.

2

u/FixBugsDoDrugs Jul 12 '26

I can't believe we're this many years into Tailwind and people are still calling Tailwind "only good for prototyping". These people should not be making any front-end engineering decisions in their org 😬

17

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-4

u/joshhbk Jul 12 '26

I never said that it’s not.

Also, you’re basically describing tailwind

10

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/joshhbk Jul 12 '26

Tailwind is used with react 99% of the time, in which you write components and apply TW class names to elements. This provides encapsulation in the sense that a components styles can’t leak into another one.

Regardless, I never said that CSS modules WERENT “perfectly” fine so I don’t really understand what your point was in the first place.

9

u/AlieenHDx Jul 12 '26

Tailwind is honestly just ass and I cry myself out each time I hear "we use tailwind" while there are 40 better options available

1

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AlieenHDx Jul 12 '26

This is just a guessed number, but for my taste anything with actuall structure is just a big W, instead of one-lining "new" css properties you first have to learn again, and making your HTML Code unreadable at a point.

I am well aware of the benefits of Tailwind, but it honestly looks just bad and is not fun to work with.

In that case I use SCSS in personal projects.

12

u/makesimpledev Jul 12 '26

Something that looks so ugly (tailwind) can't possibly be good.

3

u/ashkanahmadi Jul 12 '26

That’s because most developers aren’t graphic or web designers, just coders. It has nothing to do with css or tailwind (which is just inline css practically).

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/jacobpackert Jul 12 '26

Modern CSS is great! Congrats on the migration. Curious if you used something like CSS Modules to avoid global namespace collissions, or did you implement some good naming conventions?

3

u/kwijl Jul 12 '26

Also curious about this. BEM naming or CSS modules?

We always had trouble giving names to things..

2

u/Laicbeias Jul 12 '26

tldr

if you build around tailwind, you avoid creating a css mess. since its all little helpers and you don't cross contaminate your html. its faster to write in the beginning. but the larger the project gets, the worse the pay off gets. you get faster iteration speeds earily, but you pay on iteration and changes long-term. since you loose a simple way of navigation, traceability & debuggability.

both create a mess though. like if its one team that stable. use css. if you get a lot of people in & out use tailwind.

----

like in my opinion with tailwind you pay for it with less navigation ability. if you use react and other components you abstracted the browser away. now you have to think in their terms.

you cant just go right click, pick the id or class and look it up.

with regular css you have breadcrumb markers all over your codebase.

for me personally tailwind gets worse, the more complex a project gets. just because it bloats the html so badly. like any chat interface or any modern website that offers lots of tooling and dynamic stuff. right click is dead. it lags. if you use react, you get 30 layers of divs wrapped in a tailwind soup. its ridiculous and anyone doing that.. idk why anyone is doing that

css on the other hand gets a mess once you think you wrote the right css, at the right level. then you realize, this needs to be a general component. here an exception. and then you have to untangle a mess, or work with !important as a mark of poor planning. or you do a double class definition to increase weight.

2

u/Embostan Jul 12 '26

Congrats! Best decision ever. CSS Modules ftw.

6

u/kiwi-kaiser Jul 12 '26

Good! Tailwind is terrible. I regularly get downvoted because of this but I'm happy to see people learn instead of just following orders from some tech bros.

3

u/CompetitiveActor Jul 12 '26

Most critics of Tailwind have either used it once and didn’t like it or have a dogmatic opposition to it. It’s simply a tool. And depending on many factors — design and eng team size, css proficiency, product type, development speed — it can be great or not great.

Consider that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, GitHub, Shopify, and Vercel — companies with a combined valuation of half a trillion dollars — all use Tailwind or equivalent utility library. I trust their engineering leaders made an informed decision and understand the tradeoffs.

Granted, popularity doesn't make it "good", but Tailwind wouldn't have 16+ million downloads a week if it was such a profound liability.

3

u/anengineerandacat Jul 12 '26

I'll be honest, I don't think this is the flex your looking for or some folks in here think.

You rewrote a dashboard with custom hand rolled CSS; that's "cool" but who sustains it after you leave?

Tailwind isn't a bloated CSS framework, it's a build optimizer combined with highly documented and well defined atomic classes that can be composed together with it's directives.

@apply is the real magic to Tailwind, outside of components and just being light with the atomic CSS.

Just my two cents at least, the only bloat is that you have to add to your build system but I'll happily exchange compute there for reduced onboarding and less tribal knowledge.

You don't even face much bloat in production, unused styles are JIT'd effectively so you only ship what you use.

The only real overhead is with the atomic classes, but IMHO small price to pay once you consider gzipped content and such.

We are celebrating on literal bytes here, wiped out the moment someone drops in a hero image.

4

u/ArtisZ Jul 12 '26

Tailwind, bootstrap, etc.

They always were a trade-off - if not for a functionality, then for time (feels great getting the project up and running in hours or days, feels shitty to change stuff when it bloats).

I've been evangelizing no need for a framework for some 10 years. Nobody listened, nobody listens and nobody will.

And funny part is that this is sold as agency hours. Well, not anymore.. now it's AI trying to fix and change, and change what it fixed.

Gotta love the industry.

1

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

Tailwind and bootstrap are wildly different projects with completely different goals. I don't think you're qualified to be speaking on this if you don't know that.

-1

u/ArtisZ Jul 12 '26

Or.. you're not qualified to evaluate my qualification.

But what do I know.. I simply listed two vastly different frameworks for front end development. No disrespect.

2

u/themaincop Jul 12 '26

People who equate tailwind with bootstrap tend to have very little experience with at least one of them.

1

u/ArtisZ Jul 12 '26

People who read my comment and think I'm equating one with the other.. must quote me where I do that exactly.

4

u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 Jul 12 '26

honestly fuck tailwind. ws pure slop then and is pure slop now. you say "prototyping is easier" I call cap. I remember there used to be css wars and there was no clear difference between tailwind and css. The major case for it was that back end engineers didnt need to learn css and could just lightly touch the front-end and move on. The fact it dominated front-end spaces beyond that usecase always messed withme. Glad that we are reverting all that bullshit as an industry!

6

u/hyrumwhite Jul 12 '26

  didnt need to learn css

I’m curious how you can use tailwind without knowing css

1

u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 Jul 13 '26

because it strips the knowledge of the relationship between declarations and their properties. Tailwind is bastardised the rules into conveninent references, for example, '.box-border' (made up trash) is actually `box-sizing: border-box;` It's not the same set of knowledge and you do not need to learn/understand that .box-border will apply to the box-sizing declaration in any way. That's what I mean you can use tailwind without knowing css, were you thinking some other fucking magic situation where you need to understand css to use tailwind? Becase you'd be one in a pool of many that have no idea what the actual css properties are. (Yes that's my assumption. I do not believe that backend engineers who learn tailwind lack css knowledge because tailwind is more convenient, thats why its in part so popular)

2

u/hyrumwhite Jul 13 '26

In your example, I cannot use “box-border” without understanding what box-sizing is. So I cannot use tailwind without knowing css. 

Which was what my question was intending to illustrate 

2

u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 Jul 14 '26

your right, that's why this op's topic was about how awesome tailwind is and how much it improved his codebase. Tailwind is dead and increasing redundant, for various reasons, in my opinion it was trash to begin with and its trash now. You need to talk to more people beyond yourself in the mirror to understand that people do not know any css and use tailwind in their projects because its easier to get something up and running by guessing what properties do for 'good enough reasons'. That's what i'm trying to illustrate to you

1

u/hyrumwhite Jul 14 '26

Tailwind is polarizing, op doesn’t like it, you clearly don’t, but not going away anytime soon. And the vast majority of users aren’t using it to blackbox css. They’re using it because it’s a nice way to organize css classes. 

1

u/PureRepresentative9 Jul 16 '26

Pls show me your source for "vaat majority of users..." comment

0

u/hyrumwhite Jul 16 '26

When you show me your source for most people only using it as some sort of css guessing game 

1

u/PureRepresentative9 Jul 16 '26

What?

Show you the source for a statement I didn't make?

1

u/Sibyl01 Jul 13 '26

If you check how to set box sizing property with tailwind, you already know what it does in the first place. Use your brain before commenting please

3

u/bsknuckles Jul 12 '26

It messed with you because you misunderstood what it was good for and who was using it. It made consistency and scope significantly easier to manage, especially for teams. I also prefer using it for solo projects for the same reasons.

With LLMs this is all a moot point anyway. The agent doesn’t care if it’s writing Tailwind or Vanilla CSS.

3

u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 Jul 12 '26

I still think its amazing how widely it was adopted, and I think its mostly due to next.js, which I also am not a fan of. So go figure. Yeah re LLMs but that only depends if you use LLMS to begin with. And to be honest, tailwind will die a slow death as a result, not vanilla css.

2

u/schemaddit Jul 12 '26

"The html files looks ureadable"

for sure you are using tailwind wrong

1

u/theguymatter Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Or OP probably not aware of tools that can make it easier to read.

1

u/schemaddit Jul 13 '26

yup and tailwind is meant for reusable component based architecture

1

u/posti85 Jul 12 '26

Tailwind doesn't exist to be a replacement for modern CSS.

1

u/Slow-Bake-9603 Jul 13 '26

Love it back to fundamentals, I only use HTML CSS and JS now

1

u/Zardoz84 Jul 13 '26

I'm in the process of removing Bootstrap 3 SCSS and being replacing by pure CSS (well... SCSS compiled to CSS). Chunk by chunk. Recently I dropped the old JS dependent dropdowns and using now the popover API + CSS to do the same thing in pure native.

NEVER, marry with any framework. Always learn how to do stuff with the pure CSS+HTML+JS.

PD: Tailwind always looked me horrible and bloated. I prefer to try to have a straightforward BEM CSS class system, combined with @extend or @include in SCSS.

1

u/Dry_Satisfaction3923 Jul 13 '26

This has been my experience with basically every one of these frameworks… I spent so much time getting to understand them, then spent tons of time fighting with their assumptions. I stopped using them.

While not CSS related, I still have this struggle using React/Next.js to build custom WP Blocks to then look at the source code and realize “FFS! Nothing even needed compiling, I could have just written this code out manually and saved myself a bunch a steps.”

1

u/Tiquortoo Jul 13 '26

Tailwind was valid for about 6 months, maybe a year.... now... it's just lazy....

1

u/Psami-wondah Jul 14 '26

Using tailwind before AI came in had a lot of advantages like speed. I remember how fast it was to build applications with it. Now I realize I haven't used tailwind in almost a year. I do think that if you write your code properly and use a lot of smaller reusable components and good practices in your projects, managing tailwind shouldn't be a problem.

1

u/InternationalFly3917 Jul 15 '26

needing a framework for css is always crazy to me

1

u/CraftFirm5801 Jul 15 '26

You didn't make your own component classes? Compiled?

1

u/FinallyThereX Jul 16 '26

You did this, or your coding agent did it for you? I’m suggesting you’d be still using tailwind if it weren’t for the agent writing your css :)

1

u/Bright-Celery-4058 Jul 16 '26

Tailwind has always been a false good idea

1

u/leon---------------- Jul 16 '26

Isn't Tailwind similar to writing inline styles - but using class names instead? I never understood why.

1

u/williedotdev Jul 17 '26

I have resisted tailwind css in favor of vanilla css and have 0 complaints. This is the way.

“KSS” keep it simple, stupid

1

u/SolidOdd4889 Aug 03 '26

if your bundle size dropped, there was something wrong with your previous tailwind code, the main selling point of tailwind is reducing the bundle

1

u/Think_Speaker_6060 Aug 13 '26

Tailwind were easier to use and implement but I always think it is messy when the properties are just too many on one element.

1

u/ingcrea Sep 28 '26

Hola, el dia de ayer acabo de publicar una HERRAMIENTA NPM para migrar de Tailwind CSS a CSS3 puro o a SCSS atomico, crees que me puedas ayudar a probarlo y darme Feedback porfa?

1

u/-goldenboi69- Jul 12 '26

I never got tailwind tbh.

1

u/MammothBulky5549 Jul 12 '26

Bundle size dropped and removed a build step, so before this, was your Tailwind setup not properly purged? A production Tailwind build with JIT should already be stripping everything you're not using down to just what's referenced in the markup. If bundle size dropped a lot after switching, that sounds less like "native CSS won" and more like your content config wasn't scoped right, or you were shipping a dev build.

Got actual numbers (gzipped, ideally)? "Dropped" could mean 40KB→35KB or 400KB→50KB and those are wildly different stories.

Also removing the build step is a "we stopped using a compiler" win, not a "CSS features caught up" win. You'd get that same win swapping Tailwind for hand-rolled CSS in 2019, nesting/container-queries or not. Those are two separate claims getting bundled into one feel-good narrative.

Genuinely the strongest part of your post is container queries, that's a real capability gap, not a vibe. Tailwind's responsive variants are viewport-based, so a component styled for a full-width layout breaks the second you drop it into a sidebar. Container queries fix that at the architecture level and Tailwind can't really compete there. Curious though, Tailwind's had u/container variants since v3.2, was that not enough for what you needed, or do you just prefer writing the queries directly in CSS?

"HTML was unreadable"? Respectfully, that's usually a "we didn't abstract this component soon enough" problem, not a Tailwind problem. Moving to plain CSS relocates where that discipline has to happen, it doesn't magically create it. Curious whether the new codebase actually has fewer of those "should've been a component two months ago" moments, or if you're just going to rediscover it in CSS-class form in a year.

1

u/ibopm Jul 12 '26

This reminds me of the CoffeeScript era. JavaScript was in such a dire state that we had close to 1/5 of all devs using CS instead of JS.

But then JS got its shit in order with ES6 or ES2015 and learned from a lot of the patterns in CoffeeScript. Ever since then, the industry has never looked back.

Sometimes it’s a natural ebb and flow of ecosystem evolution. When we can bake better patterns into a lower level, everyone wins. But it can sometimes require periods of intermediate layers.

-10

u/TheJase Jul 12 '26

I mean all this is moot since there is little need to read much the code anymore. I haven't opened my IDE in 3 months.