That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc.
replyBeyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.
why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.
replyNonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
replySeriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
replyYou have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
replyI think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind.
replyYou're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
I'm quite versed in CSS but tailwind has convenient abstractions on top. It's like "why you need C if you have assembler". I don't remember when I wrote raw CSS last time. Even global styles I tend to express via @apply.
replyA bunch of people have already said this but I also have known CSS very well (being using it since its release) and even enjoyed it. Butt the moment I saw someone using Tailwind I thought, "I want that!" The idea that Tailwind is for, or rather only for, people who don't know CSS is very misguided. That said, I'm back to using vanilla CSS.
replyDon't forget that, in my opinion very positive way, it also normalized the concept of "uniform measurements". Every instance of `rounded-md` is the same on a site.
replyTrue. I'm grateful for that but typically reach for them via openprops or home built variables for most of my projects these days
replyIE, it has a built-in design system!
replyIndeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
reply