Well, I've had to stop people from introducing it into our projects before, so it is something I have to deal with. I won't passionately advocate against it, but I did enough research and have enough experience to recognize when something will not be worth it to me. And I don't know why you would classify these legitimate points against it as "hypothetical," because as far as I can tell they're solidly grounded in reality.

The central argument of its value seems to be "you need to try it to understand it," and I just don't find that to be a compelling argument. It doesn't claim to solve any problems that I recognize in my current workflow of writing well-scoped styled components.

If you’re not going to try it, that’s ok, but I think it would be fruitful to try it for 20 mins, they have an online playground. A huge advantage of tailwind is you can copy/paste another tailwind example from anywhere and it will just work on your site. (It’s like copying text from one site to another!)

I remember the arguments in 2008 from people who insisted they needed a physical phone keyboard, like a blackberry. They need to actually try a good touchscreen, vs provide untested arguments why physical keys are better. (Better in some ways? Sure. Overall? No.)

At some point it becomes an ego thing, people don’t want to admit their initial impressions were shortsighted. And it’s ok. The better experience wins out.

The problem with that argument is that once you've sufficiently "tried it," you've put so much effort in that you're stuck with it, and since there's no way to eject, you're more willing to justify it to yourself as worth it. This is stockholm syndrome.

You're right I should try it, and maybe I will try it on some throwaway project eventually, but it's not a priority and I have no interest in adding it to ongoing production projects.

I was very open about the fact I haven't tried it from my first sentence, which was "here are the reasons I have no interest in trying tailwind."

I would have more interest if someone could explain a compelling problem that I recognize and that Tailwind solves. But nobody can do that, it's all just "you have to try it [and learn our initiation rituals] and then you'll understand!"

> since there's no way to eject, you're more willing to justify it to yourself as worth it

You honestly have no idea what you're talking about, and you're making that very clear.

Lots of people in this thread have used tailwind as well as many other CSS maintenance strategies, and almost all of us prefer tailwind.

Not that mass approval makes it "right", but you certainly can spend 3 days writing your next greenfield project with tailwind, and then if you want to "eject", it would take all of 20 minutes

> You honestly have no idea what you're talking about, and you're making that very clear.

Rudeness aside, I made it very clear from the beginning that I haven't tried Tailwind, and my criticisms were based on fundamental principles that could apply to any new tech.

Of course I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to tailwind - I've never tried it. I hoped my points could be read as constructive criticism as to how to convince someone to try it, rather than an invitation for the cult-of-tailwind to pile on with insults and appeals to authority of influencers pushing foot-in-the-door sales tactics. It doesn't exactly instill a lot of motivation to join the ecosystem, and it only proves my point about the culty vibes around it.

Fair response. If you don't know what you're talking about, why are you making assertions that are incorrect, rather than asking "what's the process for ejecting if I try tailwind and don't like it?"

I wrote it in another comment but thought I had added the qualification here as well:

> There is no "eject" button, AFAIU

AFAIU as in, as far as I _understand_.

So tell me, what's the process for ejecting?

You just freeze the minimal CSS file generated by Tailwind (it tree-shakes out any class selectors for tailwind classes you're not using) and remove all tailwind dependencies; you don't have to make any more changes to your code, you're just left with the classes you've already added to your markup, which still work. You can gradually change those out however you want, at your own pace.

Also, using tailwind doesn't mean you can't use CSS the way you're used to in addition to the tailwind classes, though it's possible you could end up with specificity issues if, for example, you've added a tag selector, like `div {...}` which is overridden by a class you've added to a specific div in your markup. This is pretty straightforward though, and if you've been using CSS for any amount of time you'll still find you have to think a lot less about specificity than going all-in on your own CSS

Learning tailwind is 30 mins in their online playground. (It’s one traffic jam on your commute.)

There are countless blog posts and threads listing the advantages, but it’s better to spend that time using it and you won’t have to take someone’s word for it!

From the creator of styled components himself: https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tailwind/

Thanks for the link. The twin.macro is actually a compelling argument against my favoring of CSS-in-JS, because it "combines the best of both worlds," but for the same reason, it also increases complexity by adding yet another interlinked dependency downstream of Tailwind.

So, how's this: I promise I'll try the playground for 30 minutes sometime soon. :)

But I don't believe that's enough to learn it, because you'll still need to be constantly referencing the documentation to remember all the weird little utility classes. That's why I didn't like Bootstrap - it required memorizing some esoteric language that is totally useless ten years later. Whereas the CSS I learned in 2004 is still (mostly) just as useful today as it was then.

The reason I'm conservative in the technologies I adopt is because I've been doing web development for nearly 20 years now, and I've seen five or six cycles of fads begin and end. Very few technologies stand the test of time, and it sucks if you end up stuck with one of them on the tail end (heh) of its hype cycle. Or sometimes it's not even the end of the hype cycle, but just a major upgrade to a new version that requires you to change hundreds of files in your codebase (this is the main reason for my dislike of MUI). I don't know if Tailwind has that issue with upgrades, but I know CSS certainly does not.

Nice, glad the link was helpful!

I’m similar, webdev since the pre-jQuery days, and hate framework churn. Tailwind is kind of like jQuery in that it gives a consistency layer that CSS was missing (just like jQuery gave a better way to interact with the DOM).

Either way you find it, glad you’ll be giving it a shot!

I had the same feeling about bootstrap (and I also never really bought into it when I used it back in the day; I figured something better would come along)

Tailwind is not that. Tailwind might disappear over time, but only because future improvements to CSS might borrow ideas from Tailwind