open-props VS unocss

There's still some boilerplate, but I'm a big fan of Open Props[0] because it takes a hybrid approach. CSS isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel, but allowing for easier / more powerful approaches to difficult layouts or things that would otherwise require JS. Bootstrap is fine but troubleshooting advanced layout issues involves a lot of inspecting elements to see what styles are actually being applied (at least in my experience, YMMV) so I'd personally always bet on CSS.

[0] https://open-props.style/

I don't quite get the hate for having CSS in another file. Do you also put all your react stuff in one single file ? That same logic and argument can be applied against all modularization.

And really 20-50 tailwind classes in a single element is VERY hard to read and keep in mind. No - it does not make things clear or understandable. One tends to need to re-read and scan over from the beginning and eyes glaze over. Esp if some elements only vary with a few classes missing. I guess it works for people with very high attention to detail and high amount of working memory. I only find it personally frustrating.

Maybe tailwind css works for some bright people. I did try it for a couple of projects and only felt pain.

However, the "atomic css" philosophy behind tailwind is great. I find framewroks like https://open-props.style/ far better to use.

Open Props adds to the set by providing extra custom properties for things like easing functions or animations.

> If you wanted to actually solve theming, what you should work for is not a constrained helper function like light-dark(), but instead a shared token schema. Today nearly every company has their own token schema and different ways of naming things in the semantic token layer. If we had a shard language here, not only would it be trivial to add light/dark theming (just redefine a few variables that are already provided for you), code could be shared between sites and inherit the theming/branding.

Isn't that the idea behind https://open-props.style/ (and https://theme-ui.com/ in JS land)?

I think it's a great idea, but hampered by the lack of adoption incentives for the very people that need to adopt it for it to become successful (design system/component library authors). It introduces constraints, but the promised interoperability is not really beneficial to the people who need to work within those constraints.

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

If you choose to style with plain CSS you can add design tokens as CSS variables with Open Props: https://open-props.style.

Some time ago I discovered Open Props which provides a lot of design tokens as CSS variables and started using it in some of my projects.

CSS: Open Props (https://open-props.style/)

https://open-props.style/ gives you design tokens as CSS variables. It’s CSS only and not Svelte specific.

I wish tailwind would support attributify like https://github.com/unocss/unocss, which is much more readable for complex layouts:

  link

I feel the same about people praising Tailwind.

Tailwind (and similar, I tend to use https://unocss.dev/) is not good for your frontend architecture BUT they allow you to be so fast, that it negates the benefits.

For a job well done, I'd follow the principles of https://maintainablecss.com/

I think UnoCss is may be better than Tailwind already and has a good Vue integration https://unocss.dev/

The most popular tools that implement this approach are: Tailwind, WindiCSS, UnoCSS.

- UnoCSS: https://unocss.dev/

haha, fair point. Still, I'm on the fence about how utility components are namespaced in USWDS. Perhaps giving users the flexibility to define the namespace might work better? One thing that bugs me is the absence of class-sorting like we have in TailwindCSS. Plus, there are some gaps I've noticed in USWDS. The naming, especially when comparing "padding-x-2" and "p-x-2", can be really annoying when switching around, maybe that could also be an option for the developer or project. Similar to the ideas antfu has on uno.css https://unocss.dev/ ♥

UnoCSS is a popular option

UnoCSS — for styling with Tailwind-like atomic CSS;

Some exceptional libraries and frameworks only support VSCode, which you could argue is a bad thing, but it makes sense, VSCode is the most popular code editor after all. For example UnoCSS only has a VSCode extension, and it's my favourite way to write CSS. Astro has a LSP but I've found that the experience in VSCode is much better than in Neovim.