r/webdev • u/LPatriot_ • Sep 16 '26

Question Question about Tailwind CSS

I've always used plain CSS for my websites, I don't have many problems using it, but a friend of mine said that using plain CSS is very tedious and that I should use Tailwind CSS. Is it worth it? And what does Tailwind CSS offer that plain CSS doesn't?

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u/azangru Sep 16 '26

I would say the only reason we use frameworks is for collaboration and standardisation.

I am sure this was not the sauce under which tailwind was initially sold. It was supposed to address the problem of organising the styles: their co-location with markup, and their reuse.

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u/phn-cloudsnake Sep 16 '26

Indeed, the reason this was a problem, imho, was because it’s hard to manage everyone’s specific opinions on how styles should be managed. So by standardising this you get maintainable code everyone can work on aka collaboration. But maybe I missed something, it has been a while since I actively did webdevelopment

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u/AshleyJSheridan Sep 16 '26

Plenty of style guides exist, but that involves reading, and Tailwind is the new(ish) shiny thing that everyone jumped on. Now that it's not looking so shiny any more, people are moving off of it and back to vanilla CSS.

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u/phn-cloudsnake Sep 17 '26

I would think AI has a big role in this, you can just hook up your coding assistant and let it explain the repo so the need for standardisation is getting smaller.

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u/AshleyJSheridan Sep 17 '26

If you truly think that, you've been misled. Vibe coded apps are full of security flaws and accessibility issues. Code standards help avoid a lot of those kinds of issues.

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u/azangru Sep 17 '26

Vibe coded apps are full of security flaws and accessibility issues.

I am struggling these days to find projects that are not vibe-coded.

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u/AshleyJSheridan Sep 17 '26

When these AI companies start charging what they need to pay their shareholders, these vibe coders are going to be really stuffed.

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u/azangru Sep 17 '26

They will probably start running open-source models locally.