[qq99]

I'm surprised that a lot of the comments seem to be missing the reason that this project exists.

In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc., rather than copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes that you need to implement a nice looking button in tailwind.

Can you just apply it to `button { @apply flex items-center blahblahblah; }` in app.css? Of course you can. Or you can use the btn from DaisyUI.

I think DaisyUI is just a shortcut for many common UI components that you will inevitably want to build out and that you will necessarily eventually standardize in any app that grows large enough.

How does it differ from bootstrap? Well, you can continue to use tailwind for everything else that DaisyUI has not implemented. It's just an additive layer to tailwind. The project is at its core just a shortcut for common UI components.

As a user, my criticism is that many of the DaisyUI components seem to be lacking good contrast, so some just don't seem to be usable. The theming situation is really interesting and quite cool to use, but if you look at the example page, it just feels hard to read. I can't really find a light and dark default theme that look good to me (re: contrast and brightness). I think the color hooks might just not be there but I didn't dig far enough in.

For me, I've found a lot of value in being able to easily copy+paste parts of DaisyUI source code, e.g., a particular widget and modifying it to fit my design system, rather than use it in its entirety.

[Calavar]

> In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc., rather than copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes that you need to implement a nice looking button in tailwind.

CSS classes already support this natively.

The whole point of CSS was move up a level of abstraction, so you could collect related styles into a class and reference that class everywhere you need that same grouping of styles instead of copy/pasting your HTML2 attribute-based styles all over the place.

But then we got Tailwind, which uses CSS classes to emulate the pre-CSS behavior of specifying styles at a hyperfine granularity everywhere.

And now we get DaisyUI, which emulates class based styling on top of a toolkit that emulates attribute based styling on top of the class based system of CSS.

After while we have to admit that this tech stack contortion is the result of picking a tool because of familiarity and not because it is the best fit for the problem.

[qq99]

Just because you have Tailwind in your codebase doesn't mean you can _only_ use Tailwind. I often use a mixture of both when it makes sense. The Tailwind classes are often terser. Tailwind is not great for all things.

> which emulates class based styling

IMO, what DaisyUI does is how you are meant to be using Tailwind. You aren't supposed to use _only_ TailwindCSS classes in HTML directly (although you can). It's faster for prototyping, then once the prototype solidifies and becomes a pattern, you can extract your long tailwind string into a nice utility class.

It happens to use things like `@apply gap-2` internally in its src, so that if you want to override "how large the gaps are" in Tailwind, Daisy will also inherit that override.

[paradox460]

I've been complaining about this for years, even writing an article on it. When the article initially made it's rounds on HN it was divisive. People seem to have cooled off a bit on tailwind since then, which is good, but you still see it being dumped into new projects, or originating things like this that attempt to build a facsimile of what we get "for free" in the browser

https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...

[jarjoura]

Yes, Tailwind's CSS reminds me of the same unoptimized HTML tag soup that editors of the 2000s era web used to spit out. Tailwind is created by designers for designers. It's perfect for how designers think about layout and works well for them in a world with strict design specs.

Unfortunately, it's also incredibly bespoke and since it's found in most recent well designed templates, engineers must also learn how to work with it. Something 5 years ago that would have died from its own complexity weighing it down for the new shiney, is now kept alive by the ease at which AI can keep it going.

[koito17]

The original motivation of CSS was the cascading aspect of it. During its development, the web was largely seen as a web of documents. Style sheets tried mimicking how traditional publishers style their documents, books, etc. There is also a need to reconcile document styling applied by the user agent, the site author, and possibly other sources. This is where cascading comes into play.

Problems start to occur when using a system designed around traditional publishing to declare the layout of a web application. This is why CSS eventually gained layout-related functionality (flex, grid, container queries, etc.), among other features.

Tailwind provides two things out-of-the-box that make it convenient for building web applications: (1) it comes with a ready-to-use style system; (2) it allows styles to be colocated with markup. The second point is mostly useful for building UI components. Everything strictly related to presentation can be stored within a single file.

Before using Tailwind, I was a strong advocate of CSS modules (and I still strongly advocate for CSS modules if one wants to avoid Tailwind). With either approach, one can achieve isolated styling between components. Repeated styling or markup is a strong indicator that you should extract something into a component.

[alexchamberlain]

The first thought that came to my mind reading the DaisyUI website was "Is this an April Fool's joke?". I wouldn't normally post something like that, as it's entirely unfair to the hard work and dedication that someone has put into this. However, I think it captures my surprise by how smack on the nose this is in terms of the spiral of tech abstractions - this is exactly what CSS was designed to solve, and things like tailwind appear to be leading to people forgetting that.

[tshaddox]

Tailwind is better understood as a more powerful replacement for inline styles like <p style="color:blue;">, rather than a less powerful replacement for the full functionality of CSS.

Tailwind is an implementation of "Atomic CSS," and the biggest arguments to use Tailwind are the arguments in favor of Atomic CSS, which are well-known.

[0x457]

> But then we got Tailwind, which uses CSS classes to emulate the pre-CSS behavior of specifying styles at a hyperfine granularity everywhere.

I think it's unfair to tailwind, the point of it that it provides you sensible defaults to choose from. It's perfect for hobby write-once stuff, prototyping, then once you're happy, create a class and @apply.

It has to work like this to provide fast feedback cycle during development. Why tailwind folks insist that copying and pasting it final product is okay, I don't know.

[1shooner]

Most of my Tailwind objections have gone away with the availability of CSS layers. Now using a library for a utility layer, which can surgically override your component layer, makes perfect sense. And using a library for that component layer that adheres to the same design token API as the utility layer also makes sense.

[enricozb]

One benefit of tailwind is that while all of the classes look like they set properties with fixed values, they are actually almost all controlled by variables. This makes it easier to retain a coherent design during redesigns. Doing the same in CSS is absolutely possible, but tailwind is terser.

[exiguus]

Sure, but you want to do this also with your markup and have one source of truth not many.

[Aeolun]

And I still prefer using tailwind and daisyui to build my applications.

[CGamesPlay]

> And now we get DaisyUI, which emulates class based styling on top of a toolkit that emulates attribute based styling on top of the class based system of CSS.

I mean, no. Daisy doesn’t emulate anything, it is class based styling. It happens to have a build system that that emulates attribute based styling on top of the class based system of CSS, but Daisy’s classes appear in your CSS as normal CSS classes.

[SebastianKra]

That's what components are for. One of the issues with classes is that you inevitably run into a behavior that requires additional dom nodes or js. For example, what if your most of your buttons need to show loading states [^1].

Bootstrap is actually not as bad as I remember, but I still see quite a few examples where their api requires complex & specific combinations of elements. Just compare their Accordion to ShadCN's.

For simple buttons you may get away with classes only (not worth the risk imo), but anything more complex than a dropdown should be a component. Case in point: daisyUIs dropdown doesn't support arrow key navigation or escape.

[^1]: https://www.radix-ui.com/themes/docs/components/button#loadi...

[rcarr]

For anyone else reading, this is also stated in the Tailwind docs: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/styling-with-utility-classes#us....

[qq99]

How are you going to style your components, if not via CSS classes?

[slightwinder]

> In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc., rather than copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes that you need to implement a nice looking button in tailwind.

Isn't this called classes and Ids in CSS? Is Tailwind just CSS on top of CSS?

[qq99]

Tailwind is a set of utility CSS classes you can use that tend to guide you into writing CSS that looks like it "fits" together. E.g., consistent gaps if you use `gap-1`, `gap-2`, etc., rather than a hodgepodge of "hmm did I use margin-right: 2px or 1em or what" that can emerge in a large CSS codebase with many developers. We can use a `m-1` or `p-1` class to define a base padding, and as long as everyone knows that `1` is the amount of space to use by default, everything will generally look like it fits together.

Later, you can optionally redefine what `1` means if you want more space in your design. In a way, using tailwind can be like variablizing your CSS at compile time (in a faster way than just using writing and using CSS variables).

For a lot of things, using just 1-3 tailwind classes on a div is sufficient for many common tasks, e.g., `flex flex-row gap-1` boom done. You can put this directly in the HTML, and is considered "fine".

An example from DaisyUI's site is:

``` <button class="bg-zinc-100 border font-semibold text-zinc-900 text-sm px-4 duration-200 py-2.5 transition-all hover:border-zinc-300 hover:bg-zinc-200 focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:outline-zinc-900 active:translate-y-[0.5px] inline-flex gap-2 rounded-sm active:border-zinc-300 active:bg-zinc-200 active:shadow-none text-center align-middle cursor-pointer border-zinc-200 dark:border-zinc-700 dark:bg-neutral-700 dark:text-zinc-300 dark:hover:border-zinc-950 dark:hover:bg-zinc-950 dark:focus-visible:outline-zinc-200 dark:active:border-zinc-950 dark:active:bg-zinc-900"> ```

This is everything needed to make a button look nice in tailwind, and obviously it would be insane to copy+paste this every time you want a nice looking button in your HTML (not to mention the byte size, it's just unreadable).

The best thing to do is define a `.btn` or `.button` (usually I might avoid `button` DOM level selector for future flexibility) and encapsulate these styles as a semantic component in your .css file. You can write them with raw CSS or `@apply bg-zinc-100 border ...;` using tailwind style @apply.

This is what DaisyUI provides you, a shortcut to common nice looking UI components.

[exiguus]

The hole point of having a Component-Library is to reuse Components. And a component is markup, style and functionality. Not only the CSS. E.g. you want to use the same Button-Component all over the place in your project and not re-declare <button class="btn btn-secondary">text</button> again and again in your project. If you think about more complex Component like a sort able table, it becomes more obvious.

[danenania]

Imo the main benefit of Tailwind (or any other style-in-JS approach) is parameterization. Styling often changes based on runtime state. Mapping runtime states to css classes/ids (or scss functions et al) is brittle and doesn't scale well.

[kylecordes]

Historically, the way to standardize how a component appears with Tailwind is to use component abstraction in whatever tool you are building with to accomplish that. Define a button once somewhere and then throw on whatever classes it needs.

If you were copy-pasting long strings of Tailwind classes all over, you were already doing it wrong before you even heard of Daisy.

[qq99]

Sure, you might make a `<Button>` UI component (assume React), but if it embeds 30 classes in it, when you server-render this, every button on your page is contributing ~30 classes worth of bytes to the payload sent across the wire.

[freeone3000]

The need for a component abstraction is the problem?

`<button class=“steve”>` will render like every other steve button, subject to context, cascading down the rules, and applied globally.

You don’t need anything for this but CSS and HTML.

[mejutoco]

> In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc., rather than copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes that you need to implement a nice looking button in tailwind.

I think in most projects people are using some sort of component system outside of tailwind. A react component, for example, could have the tailwindcss classes. Then that component is used multiple times.

[qq99]

Yes, they'll typically have a UI component that accepts props and may have some internal state.

DaisyUI is operating at the style layer, so you might use it to achieve the visuals for your UI component (regardless of how you achieve your UI component, be it React/Vue/server-rendered/etc)

I'm suggesting that just because you have a UI component, it doesn't mean you should be sending 30 tailwind classes for this button across the wire (in a server-rendered approach), and DaisyUI is 1 mechanism to achieve this with approximately 1 component CSS class.

[const_cast]

> In many tailwind projects, you inevitably end up wanting to standardize how a button looks, how a field looks, etc.

You should be using components for this, in whatever backend or frontend framework you have.

And if you say "well this button needs to have this specific piece of data or text but other buttons don't" - great, extract that from the component. There's no reason to create 12 different buttons.

[jug]

But I mean, Tailwind exists to make you quickly prototype and standardize upon a personal look & feel for your site and reuse these styles with components. The standardization/reuse aspect is absolutely part of it.

[qq99]

I think you're agreeing with me. DaisyUI is 1 implementation of a standardization shortcut so you don't have to e.g., develop your own button, dropdown, modal, nav, etc (whatever you are interested to consume from DaisyUI)

[begueradj]

> you can continue to use tailwind for everything else that DaisyUI has not implemented. It's just an additive layer to tailwind.

I used VuetifyJs with Tailwind in the same project, so I do not see the difference/advantage

[doctoboggan]

> Can you just apply it to `button { @apply flex items-center blahblahblah; }` in app.css? Of course you can.

I tried using tailwind a few years ago and I think this was explicitly recommended against, at least at that time.

[lowercased]

The docs up through version 3.x explicitly called this out as not recommended and a poor choice, but the justifications were... sort of lame. "You'll have to come up with class names, your css bundle might be bigger, etc". I did read a more technical github issue on @apply vs theme() which called out the apply behaviour as doing a bit more than expected. I don't recall 'theme' being a thing in earlier tailwind versions, but I'm not an expert at it, so I might have missed that.

[qq99]

IIRC the creator of tailwind might have been against @apply too, but it didn't seem like a good recommendation to me

[martini333]

> copy+paste the same 20+ tailwind classes

No sane developer does this. Where does the Tailwind team or documentation encourage this?