pollen VS css-media-vars

So frameworks like https://www.pollen.style/ are doing this. Personally I still prefer the tailwind approach.

I do think that the real value of Tailwind comes from the utility classes, rather than css-in-html paradigm. You could achieve the same, for example, with Pollen.css [0] or Open Props [1].

[0] https://github.com/heybokeh/pollen

[1] https://github.com/argyleink/open-props

Tailwind is a great option to look into, I really enjoy it, but if you want something a bit more in-between, you can check out frameworks like https://www.pollen.style. There you get a framework of consistent CSS variables you can use, while still writing all your vanilla CSS yourself with full control of everything.

It uses UnoCSS (think TailwindCSS but super customizeable) with Pollen (which is similar to open props).

Very similar to Pollen (https://www.pollen.style), though it looks a little more complicated.

IMO the main value of Tailwind is that it's a step function over your units and colors, which helps bring better consistency and dev speed to UI implementation.

Tailwind's "write class names instead of CSS" approach makes sense in the component-based systems most apps are built in these days, where pretty much any repeated markup will be turned into a component. It performs better than scoped styles and is less complicated.

A CSS variable approach like Open Props or Pollen is, in my experience, better if you're not using a component-based system (ie. conventional HTML) and therefore have repeated markup patterns. Having a simple class name to apply to repeated markup is much more maintainable than trying to copy/paste a long tailwind string around.

Pollen and Open Props are two popular examples of such token first frameworks. If you are not familiar with CSS Custom Properties (also called CSS variables), I recently wrote about how to use them to create a CSS Style API layer.

In the last few years, a new set of frameworks with a radically different concept drew the attention of frontend developers. These frameworks are now extremely popular in the frontend world, and you’re likely already familiar with them: Tailwind CSS and Pollen.

Ah! This is brilliant. There are quite a few comments here about pitching this against other CSS frameworks or the actual use of this.

This is not a stand-alone framework or anything of that start. Treat as one of your scaffold components for your styling framework. Tailwind does this with their tailwind.config.js and is more of raw CSS design tokens. I just wish their commercial TailWindUI[1] make it easy to make use of it the better way.

I wish I saw Pollen a few months ago. I wanted to do an effortless design for my personal website and stick to as plain vanilla CSS as possible. The best way was to rely on CSS-Variables. I did do it from scratch[2]. It works though it is pretty hacky, and I'm not too concerned. Right now, I can swap few values and have an entirely different color scheme - light/dark version of my own, Nord Theme[3], and I will keep adding me whenever I get bored. I can even tweak the rhythms and spacing to my liking with just the variable. You should check out the demo[4] or look at the source[5] (wip).

For those who find this interesting, you should check out another interesting one I discovered a few months back -- css-media-vars[6].

1. https://tailwindui.com

2. https://github.com/oinam/oinam-jekyll/blob/main/_includes/cs...

3. https://www.nordtheme.com

4. https://oinam.github.io/oinam-jekyll/

5. https://github.com/oinam/oinam-jekyll

6. https://github.com/propjockey/css-media-vars