With all of the discourse circulating around Tailwind, I wanted to explain why I use & support Tailwind. This was originally a much longer post highlighting the benefits of Tailwind, but I think I was overcomplicating a pretty simple issue. This might be one of my shorter blog posts, but here it goes —
Tailwind is not a shortcut to avoid learning CSS. Tailwind is not an alternative to learning CSS. Tailwind is not always a better option than CSS. And yes, everything you can do in Tailwind can be done in CSS.
That's not the point.
The point of Tailwind is to save time across the board. The point of Tailwind is to create a cohesive design system. The point of Tailwind is make your life easier.
Like anything else, you have to be mindful of the advantages and disadvantages of the tool. Yes, Tailwind can look like hell, but you're probably shipping faster and making better design choices than if you're using vanilla CSS, and that's really what it's about.
Maybe Tailwind won't last. We don't have any real way of knowing what frameworks or libraries will stand the test of time. Tailwind haters get one thing right — you should absolutely know the fundamentals of what you're using before using any kind of framework or library on top of it.
But if something exists that can make your life, and 8.1m other lives ¹, easier, why the hell wouldn't you use it? Because it looks bad sometimes? Because you don't like the abstraction?
Why are we using programming languages at all when we could just use machine code?
See how ridiculous that sounds?