My Thoughts on Tailwind
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For a while now I've been pretty dismissive of TailwindCSS, usually brushing it off as yet another BootstrapCSS alternative. However, I've started using it in several of my side projects and I think I've changed some of my opinions on it as a tool.
Background:
Before using Tailwind, I was using Vanilla Extract, and before that was using Styled Components. I pivoted from each tool to the next one because of other technical limitations. In the case of the change from Styled Components to Vanilla Extract it was because I wanted to move away from runtime styling solutions (partially to prepare for React Server Components).
The shift from Vanilla Extract to Tailwind was similar, but more of a developer
experience reason rather than for user experience. The short gist is that using
Vanilla Extract with a Next.js application is incredibly difficult to setup
"correctly". Yes there is a Next.js "plugin", but that doesn't work at all with
React Server Components within Next.js[1]Jump to footnote. For Tailwind
however, all I need to get it working is a tailwind.config.js file and Next
does all the hard work for me!