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I Hate Tailwind and Love Bootstrap

necromant2005.github.io

29 points by rmykhajliw 10 hours ago · 15 comments

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rmykhajliwOP 10 hours ago

I don’t believe the Tailwind approach is a stable, scalable, or reliable solution for large, long-living products.

It works well for fast delivery, prototypes, and teams optimizing for short-term speed, but over time it tends to spread styling decisions across markup, making the system harder to control, reason about, and maintain.

  • tmnvix 8 hours ago

    I agree. But also, on a broader note, I have no desire to introduce node for the sole purpose of some css niceties.

    Coming back a couple of years later to a broken build system when you just want to change a colour is no fun.

rahimnathwani 8 hours ago

"Bootstrap takes the opposite approach by limiting flexibility and embedding decisions into predefined components."

If you choose tailwind, nothing is stopping you from using components. You can choose to use predefined components, or you can create your own. Or some mix.

  • freedomben 7 hours ago

    My thoughts too. There's no real reason I can think of that you couldn't build a Bootstrap on top of Tailwind. They're kind of at different levels of the stack.

mardix 3 hours ago

DaisyUI[0] is the Bootstrap on Tailwind.

Bootstrap makes everything looks the same. With Tailwind, most of the times and besides the colors, you have to look in the code to know it's Tailwind.

[0]https://daisyui.com/

jaapz 8 hours ago

Ah, time for the pendulum to start swinging back again

bentocorp 5 hours ago

I am missing the point of Tailwind?

Don't you get the same effect and functionality from simply adding style attributes directly on the elements in HTML?

Why is that approach considered bad practice, while Tailwind, which is effectively the same – but with shortened names – accepted as common practice?

As the article states, at least with Bootstrap you are sharing common behaviour with a single class name that can then be modified globally.

  • rmykhajliwOP 33 minutes ago

    My point is when you have 100 different ways to achieve result - it's always led to inconsistency. And it's very dangerous in large distributed app because resolution of those small differences means you have to support 50+ variation of the same submit button.

    Personally I'd prefer to have up to 5-10 option of buttons for all possible cases. And it's not only visual simlicity, and not only easier to support but even help your own customers because they are not have to looking for 100+ different button styles.

ricardobeat 9 hours ago

What happens in practice is you use Tailwind with components (React or otherwise), so you build `<Button primary>` using tailwind classes internally; this is functionally the same as the boostrap classes, but can standardize much more than styles.

It just adds an extra layer of abstraction, which I happen to also find unnecessary.

  • montroser 4 hours ago

    > It just adds an extra layer of abstraction, which I happen to also find unnecessary.

    Can't tell if you're talking about React or Tailwind

MK_Dev 7 hours ago

Tell 'em! I also hate React and love Razor, but most don't seem to share that sentiment

jdmoreira 8 hours ago

Just use DaisyUI

  • freedomben 7 hours ago

    Indeed. Claude jammed DaisyUI into a vibe code weekend project when I wasn't looking, and I've actually been pretty happy with it even now that I have to code myself (AI starts to really suck ass for the last 20%, so I usually take over then, but love the bootstrapping and PoC-ness). Petal UI is usually my preference, though that's only on Elixir LiveView (but that's my stack of choice anyway)

ceritium 8 hours ago

Me too

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