Material UI VS Tailwind CSS

MUI is the OG of UI component libraries. They’ve been at the top back since when Bootstrap was a contender and are still maintaining a top spot in the era of Tailwind and other UI libraries. With more than 95k GitHub stars (and counting), and top companies using it in production, I’d say this is the open-source React component library with the most stars. MUI also has paid components available for enterprise users.

🎨 Project: Material UI 💡 Why Contribute: If design systems and UI frameworks are your thing, Material UI is a must-contribute project. Help maintain or enhance one of the most popular React component libraries used by thousands of developers globally.

Coincidentally, I thought it was this bug that bit you; it was reported a couple of days ago https://github.com/mui/material-ui/issues/43823

To start, I'll be using MUI's Album Template for demo purposes, as I feel that it uses some of the more common components that you'll likely be using. Please note that this repo is template is older so some of the components in it are deprecated.

GitHub: https://github.com/mui/material-ui

Material UI GitHub Repository

The most popular CSS-in-JS libraries are styled-components and Emotion. MUI, a React component library, recently released a promising, zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library called Pigment CSS. This article will explore the features and benefits of Pigment CSS, offering a comparison to styled-components and Emotion based on performance, features, developer experience, and community support.

> [0, 1, 2, -1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, -1, 26, 27, 28]

What is that supposed to represent in terms of pagination? Are they cursors...?

> I didn't think the code that generated the HTML from that was really worth testing because it was so superficial.

For what it's worth (as a frontend person), pagination is traditionally one of the trickier things for us to make sure is working correctly. Off-by-one mistakes can happen for example (especially with zero-indexed items). Or sometimes the prev/next buttons don't correctly use the same math as the page 1, 2, 3, etc. buttons. It gets even harder if you don't know the total length in the beginning, or if you allow multiple page sizes or sorts/filters, or use lazy loading, etc.

For those reasons I try to use a ready-built lib like MUI where all that is already tested internally (like https://github.com/mui/material-ui/blob/next/packages/mui-ma... or https://github.com/mui/material-ui/blob/next/packages/mui-ba...), but we still add our own automated and manual tests in our own usages.

But then again I'm bad at math and division, lol, so maybe it's just my own weakness.

Styling: Tailwind CSS

I primarily work on Windows, though I also use Linux, so I needed a cross-platform solution. I chose Electron for its flexibility and paired it with Svelte, TailwindCSS, and Vite-Electron. Vite made dev setup fast and clean, which I really appreciated.

TailwindCSS

> When I’m trying to debug a web app, it’s hard to orient myself in the DevTools if the entire UI is “div soup”

That’s tame. Try adding some Tailwind CSS.

After monitoring Tailwind CSS since its early days, and believing I had some pretty serious philosophical disagreements with it, I recently took an opportunity to try it out in earnest, and it is so mindbogglingly obnoxious in dev tools that I think surely I must be missing something. How do people cope with this stuff!?

If you’re not sure what I’m on about, go through some of the sites linked near the bottom of https://tailwindcss.com/. In the Inspector/Elements panel, the DOM tree is a bloated mess with a class attribute which amounts to inline styles or worse, commonly hundreds of characters long, discouraging you from using semantically-meaningful classes, and duplicating stuff enormously rather than using sane selectors; the mostly-better ones are those that have data-sentry-{element,component,source-file} attributes. The styles subpanel becomes utterly unnavigable.

(I’m not saying everything in Tailwind is bad; I think I am likely to use a limited utility styles approach more than I did in the past, and there are a couple of other things that are provoking thought in me, and I think it would be more suitable in apps than in marketing-style websites. But the total embodiment of it is not for me.)

We use dynamic importing to solve a strange bug in Tailwind CSS that is marked as solved but still occurs.

UI: Preact + Tailwind/shadcn

Styling: Tailwind CSS (Assumed, common with Next.js)