Tailwind is less than ideal

2023/07/06

I’ve been a web developer now for over a decade and one framework that I will pretty much refuse to use, unless inherited, on a project is Tailwind. This is because after trying it out on a few projects. You have to add however many classes to your HTML elements to get things almost to where they need to be. Garbling up your HTML mark-up and yet I still add in custom css to make the site looked as designed.

Class vomit in your HTML

The biggest gripe with Tailwind I have is that you have to add multiple different classes to do anything and one you have your mobile or desktop layout done. You have to add even more classes to account for responsiveness. Then by the time you have things looking like you want them. You can easily have 10+ classes added to a single element. Add that on top of an entire page. You’re looking at a lot of classes being used across your site.

Custom designs are near impossible

Even after all the class vomit is had and your site is looking close to the way you want it to look. You’ll more than likely still have to input some custom CSS to allow your site to match the design you either created or were provided. Yeah you can edit Tailwind to allow for a more custom design, but you’ll have to do some heavy lifting at the beginning of the project to bend Tailwind to what you need.

It makes your code hard to read for other developers

Tailwind also makes your html structure super hard to read if you’re not the only developer on the project or another developer has to take the project over. I say this because every developer has their own touch on how they do things and trying to figure out what they’re doing through reading a long list of classes on an element isn’t the funnest thing to do. Couple that with any custom CSS that they may have had to create to get things to look just right. It takes a while for another developer to figure out what you’re doing.

Does Tailwind have a place?

Yes. Tailwind does have a place in web development, but it’s place is one where you just want to have a standard looking site where you have only so much control over your styling. However, that isn’t useful in my case as the vast majority of the designs I work with have custom enough designs that it’s easier to fire up a project with sass and build things that way.