> But it's great knowing that the next dev we hire can pick it up and go from day one.
Presumably the next dev you will hire will be a frontend engineer? CSS is a core competency for a frontend engineer, whereas Tailwind is an add-on. If I were choosing a frontend engineer for my team, I would make sure there core competencies are up to snuff.
But I get your point. It's the same as the article, right? You still need to understand CSS to use Tailwind, so why bother? I guess each to their own. Maybe we'll regret this in a few years, but it works very well and feels much more maintainable for us now. I've certainly worked on enough projects (and, mercy!) had to pick up enough projects where the 'vanilla' CSS was absolute spaghetti!
Reading your Tailwind example, I must confess that I have no idea what "p-4" or "pb-1" are; or what the border-radius will be for the "rounded" class, or what color the "white" will be in bg-white.
> I've certainly worked on enough projects (and, mercy!) had to pick up enough projects where the 'vanilla' CSS was absolute spaghetti!
And I am very guilty of having written such spaghetti in my first big project :-) But authoring FE code as components, and encapsulating styles inside of components (with either CSS modules, or scoped styles) has helped tremendously. Perhaps web components will save us, by allowing full style encapsulation inside the shadow DOM, thus eliminating CSS-at-scale headaches altogether.
> I must confess that I have no idea what "p-4" or "pb-1" are ...
Of course! That's the Tailwind add-on, right? I guess the key being you can move between projects that use Tailwind and know it's a rem unit of padding all round and .25rem padding at the bottom. And when you come back to it 3 months later, you still know.
> And I am very guilty of having written such spaghetti in my first big project :-)
Oh, me too and not just the first! It's amazing how quickly things can turn to pasta when you're rushing to hit deadlines! :-/ But I think you're right, with good practice everything gets a bit more maintainable. Let's hope we get there eventually!
Presumably the next dev you will hire will be a frontend engineer? CSS is a core competency for a frontend engineer, whereas Tailwind is an add-on. If I were choosing a frontend engineer for my team, I would make sure there core competencies are up to snuff.