[jastr]

When you first hear Tailwind's concepts, they seem to contradict everything you know about good software design. When you try it out and begin to remember some of the class names, you get into a great state of flow - it's the high developers are always chasing.

I can't help but feel that Tailwind detractors have never actually tried Tailwind or are too square to give it a chance.

[alphabet9000]

regarding 'contraditing everything you know about good design' i feel this way about designing webpages using <table> elements. the constraint really forces you to be creative with using image elements to make everything fit on the page just right. styling with tables used to be popular, but then it went out of fashion, unfortunately. i'd like to see it make a comeback. i'm not being sarcastic either.

[wohfab]

It was "popular", because there was no good option to do stuff. Now there are plenty options. Tables are for tabular content. Using it anywhere else is a spit in the face of accessibility.

[iovrthoughtthis]

i think we too easily fall for the heuristic of separate files == separate concerns

but your concerns arent really separate if, while in their separate files, they are concerned about the same things

and, so long as you want relative styling, they always will be. you can either (1) attach properties to your tree or (2) flatten your tree into a list of paths and attach properties to nodes that match the paths

in (1), changing the structure can only impact an individual node or it's children, only by the properties attached to the node and it's parents; changing the style can also only impact an individual node or its children

in (2), changing structure can impact the individual node, it's children, siblings or parents by any rules that now match any of the mentioned nodes; changing style will impact all matching nodes (not all of whom can be identified statically) and their children and may interact with other rules which apply properties to matching nodes.

either way, you cant escape the structure of the tree and one strategy lets you scope your changes easily, the other does not.