Why is it that Tailwind causes such emotional reactions in people? Functional CSS has been around a long time now.

When functional css ideas were introduced it presented a novel solution for scoping issues, naming issues and bloat issues. I remember discovering basscss and tachyons around 2015. The paradigm immediately felt like a huge improvement in my workflow. The iteration was so much faster than what I was used to with Bootstrap, BEM, or SCSS- I felt like I could design in code for the first time. My favorite workflow for web design became loading basscss in a CodePen, with almost no idea of the outcome I wanted and iterating towards something. What’s kind of amazing is that it allowed for these sorts of quick sketches and improved maintainability in large projects.

It also led me to my first inkling of a design system- through the use of composable and constrained styling primitives. A lot of the ideas introduced with those libraries now saturate the frontend ecosystem. And keep in mind, functional CSS, or at least the principles behind it have evolved a lot since 2015, particularly when it comes to components and CSS-in-JS. The original creator of basscss has gone on to create a number of equally impressive projects that advance the main ideas: styled-system, rebass, basically everything from @jxnblk.

I haven’t used Tailwind or any other functional CSS philosophy over the past few years since I find primitive and composable styling components, CSS-in-JS, themes, and CSS variables offer even better workflows for building the applications I work on. When Tailwind initially made a splash I was already pretty into what I consider this next phase of styling libraries- so I was a bit confused why people were so excited about it when basscss and tachyons had been around for years. Looking through the docs it seemed like they had taken basscss and tachyons and layered a bit of Bootstrap on top (in the form of nicer visual defaults and some component patterns).

Outside of the core functional principles, I don’t like the idea of Tailwind as much as I do basscss/tachyons. I think Tailwind tries to put too much of your styling in atomic classes. Part of what makes basscss great is the small API and the constraints it introduces on reusable patterns. I don’t want all of CSS to be represented as atomic classes- just the stuff I reuse 90% of the time. It also seems like a bit too much tooling when one of the main advantages I saw in the older libraries were that they were just plain CSS- you could use them on pretty much any project, regardless of build tools or architecture. I used to start with basscss on a project and then add my own layers of patterns on top- extending the system as needed.

That said it still offers a lot of the good stuff, combined with great documentation and more thought put into component patterns. It’s a great starting point, especially if you don’t want to or can’t take on runtime costs for CSS-in-JS (this is also evolving but still a concern). Its success isn’t a fluke or a result of misdirection as the author of this critique alleges. Reading through Adam Wathan’s original post on functional css (https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-... he describes the exact same trajectory in CSS thinking I went through as a frontend developer through the 2010s. It’s a great read and I think speaks to the level of consideration put into the library. If I were to try a new project today using functional CSS I’d definitely give Tailwind a shot.