Apologies for reading more into your article than it was trying to say. You're probably right that we're talking past each other a little bit. That being said:

> I'm saying the interface of a website and the documents it contains are muddled.

There is some truth to this, but it's overstated. I don't believe that the distinction between a website and a document is particularly clear on a conceptual level. Those things are muddled on the web because they are actually muddled in real life, there isn't a clear distinction between a document and an application -- and often it makes sense to treat them as the same thing.

> I said that interface-html and interface-css are tightly coupled. This is already true. They already almost always evolve together. It is already exceedingly rare to see a web site/app fully redesign without changing html.

I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. Redesigns are large. I'd say an above-average number of site redesigns that I see involve changing the database layer too, that doesn't mean I'd encourage everyone to stop separating their database from their application logic.

A bigger thing here though is that this feels opposite to me to how I think about HTML. HTML in your app should be more likely to change than your CSS, not the other way around. HTML is your user interface. When you do a site redesign, you change what data you present to the user and how you present it. That's HTML. To me, this is like saying that splitting font display from UTF-8 characters is wrong because most of the time you revise a book it involves changing the characters, not just the font.

Incidentally if you redesign a website you will also often change the style, but... the style is secondary. I love the CSS garden stuff, I love how it got people thinking about separation of concerns, but it also encouraged people to think of HTML as if it's this extremely static interface that we apply a manifold of styles to, and that's usually incorrect.

So sure, of course HTML and CSS often change in parallel, but... so?

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> I am saying component-oriented approaches are ~recognizing and trying to rectify this mismatch (and people using Tailwind are reacting to a real deficiency in the core technologies).

This is another thing where I feel like there must be something I'm missing because if you said this in isolation without mentioning Tailwind, I think I'd agree with it. I do agree that using semantic tags in CSS is bad for maintainability. I do agree that CSS has downsides, and I do think it should almost always be used in a component-oriented fashion.

But I've used Tailwind for a little while now (maybe not heavily enough, I don't know?) -- I don't think Tailwind is very component-oriented. It's component-oriented in the strictest sense that you put styles on a component. But it doesn't encourage building logical units of style, it doesn't encourage reuse, it doesn't encourage structuring of style, it makes it harder to look at the output and understand where a style is coming from or what part of the code set it.

You can have that stuff with Tailwind, but Tailwind doesn't seem to be helping with it, and most of the time that I see Tailwind it makes it harder to reason about the style of the app in a structured way. Most of the time I see Tailwind it's just attached directly to HTML like an inline style. And if I came to you and said I was going to stop using functions and just inline all of my code, you wouldn't characterize that as "component-based programming".

Honestly, if we're talking about component-based interfaces, Tailwind-based interfaces feel a lot more like early JQuery interfaces than they feel like React or Vue. Forget separation of style and layout, I don't think Tailwind encourages the use of components at all.

At least to me -- again, I know a bunch of people love it, I keep thinking there must be something I'm missing. But in practice, every Tailwind app I hack on makes it harder for me to couple CSS to a JS component.