There’s a worrying trend in modern web development, where developers are throwing away decades of carefully wrought systems for a bit of perceived convenience. Tools such as Tailwind CSS seem to be spreading like wildfire, with very few people ever willing to acknowledge the regression they bring to our field. And I’m getting tired of it
I do find it absolutely astonishing that Tailwind basically re-invented inline styles. I mean, I understand how they got there. The individual steps on their journey make sense, in a way. But the end result is still just inline styles with an advertising budget.
It’s like people wanted to use inline styles and forego the advice from those darned experts to build things properly. And then, when a legitimate-looking framework lets them use something that’s inline styles, but doesn’t quite look like it, then they’re all over that.
Well, until they need to refactor.
I mean it is not really inline styles, with inline styles only it is e.g. not possible to implement a hover style AFAIK. I think the inventor has written a blog post explaining the steps, is that what you are referring to? I also read that, and it kinda makes sense, but basically giving up on development tools to work properly is kind of a high trade IMO.
I would also be interested in seeing a performance benchmark. As the article says, gzip will probably make the difference in terms of network traffic negligible, but it would be interesting to see the impact it has on parsing HTML.