> You don't need CSS to offer an additional unit of reuse

Erm. Isn't this one of tailwind's selling points? That you have a set of classes that you keep reusing?

You're probably confusing something with something?

CSS Modules are a JS-only third party solution re-invented/re-implemented in a dozen different ways for various JS frontend frameworks. Requires setting up, requires learning an additional library.

If you mean these CSS modules: https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules?tab=readme-ov-fil... then they need to be supported by whatever build chain you use. And you literally need to use them slightly different than normal CSS. E.g. for Vite yuo need to have `.module.css` extension. And they often rely on additional libraries to learn. E.g. you can enable Lightning CSS with aforementioned Vite which comes with its own CSS flavour: https://lightningcss.dev/css-modules.html

If you mean CSS import attributes, they only appeared in 2024 in Chrome and Firefox, early 2025 in mobile Android etc. and they don't provide magical local scoping out of the box: https://caniuse.com/wf-css-modules

lg:dark:hover:bg-red-500

> on large screens

> in dark mode

> when hovering

> bg should be red-500

The above is an unrealistic example, but, you can't achieve that with the style attribute. You'd have to go into your stylesheet and put this inside the @media query for the right screen size + dark mode, with :hover, etc.

And you'd still need to have a class on the element (how else are you going to target that element)?

And then 6 months later you get a ticket to change it to blue instead. You open up the HTML, you look at the class of the element to remind yourself of what it's called, then you go to the CSS looking for that class, and then you make the change. Did you affect any other elements? Was that class unique? Do you know or do you just hope? Eh just add a new rule at the bottom of the file with !important and raise a PR, you've got other tickets to work on. I've seen that done countless times working in teams over the past 20 years - over a long enough timeline stylesheets all tend to end up a mess of overrides like that.

If you just work on your own, that's certainly a different discussion. I'd say Tailwind is still useful, but Tailwind's value really goes up the bigger the team you're working with. You do away with all those !important's and all those random class names and class naming style guide discussions.

I used to look at Tailwind and think "ew we were supposed to do CSS separate from HTML why are we just throwing styles back in the HTML". Then I was forced to use it, and I understood why people liked it. It just makes everything easier.

Very different :-) Inline styles do not have access to @-rules.

> What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So you require the discipline just like CSS to keep things up to date.

You solve these problems by creating abstractions in JavaScript (most likely react components), exactly the same way you'd solve any other sort of code duplication.

By using tailwind (or inline styles), you go from two system of abstraction (CSS, JavaScript) to one (just JavaScript).

The situation you describe is one of the most maddening things about tailwind, and what leads to most of it being write only code, in my opinion

> was it not interesting to discover how to build such a discipline? Was it not intriguing to learn how people who had been writing CSS for years had made it tolerable?

As someone who writes tiny amounts of CSS these days (having known it reasonably in the late 90s and early 2000s with all the hacks and IE related bullshit), I have _zero_ interest in it.

If I'm doing it, it's only because there's no serious cross-platform equivalent to Windows Forms to power small experiments, and curiosity is certainly not there to improve the experience.

I’ve been building web sites and applications since 2000. I’ve done just about everything you can imagine SCSS, BEM, whatever. Tailwind is the best thing I’ve seen in that time.

We can agree to disagree about that, and that’s OK.

I should note that other than Clojure, I absolutely hate dynamically typed languages. I suspect (though dunno how to prove it) that folks who like Tailwind probably like statically typed systems and maybe functional programming- it seems to fit into that philosophical niche. And probably people who like vanilla CSS are in a different category.

I’d love to hear from both camps to find out whether or not that tracks.