I agree with you about discipline; but... 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?

Besides, there recently have been several crucial improvements to CSS to address these pain points. One is CSS layers, which lets define custom layers of specificity that help with the discipline (e.g. resets or some baseline styles go in a low layer, component styles go in a higher layer, and finally overrides end up in the highest layer). The other is CSS scope, which prevents the leakage of the styles. These should greatly help with the specificity issues; and @layer is now sufficiently broadly supported that it is safe to use.

> If you’re writing markup for a component, you have to jump between two files.

Yeah; one of the reasons for my question about the groups in which tailwind saw the biggest growth was that in some ecosystems jumping between files was not a problem to begin with. Vue, for instance, had single-file components, where css could be written in the same file as javascript. So did svelte. So does astro.

> 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.