svelte-headlessui VS open-props

As a side note, my project was the first to be published under the name svelte-headlessui and is both more popular and more complete than the other project. I don't know why the other guy picked an identical name but it drives me a little nuts because of how unnecessarily confusing it is.

There is an unofficial Svelte port here but it doesn’t appear to be maintained so there may be a better option… that said there are a ton of better options if you want to use Tailwind with Svelte.

This and passing styles to slots, are biggest bottlenecks in wrapping components (your use case) and creating headless components (see headless ui).

Headless UI as in svelte-headlessui?

Svelte Headless UI should get some new PRs merged soon based on some comments u/ryangossiaux posted in the repo less than a week ago. He stepped away from the project for a bit after putting in a tremendous amount of work into it, and as someone who has used his library alongside Tailwinds UI on a number of projects, I’m super thankful for what he’s managed to do, and I hope that more people from the community will help support the project.

The component's come pre-styled. Styles can be overridden by tailwind classes, and here's a guide for that on the docs! If you want to use components that don't come pre-styled, I would suggest using something like Svelte Headless UI.

Just in case you haven't seen it, I ported Headless UI to Svelte recently: https://github.com/rgossiaux/svelte-headlessui

About two weeks into my first project I did purchase Tailwind UI. It is a massively useful resource, and I use it several times a week. It is a great reference tool, and is being actively added to. I have definitely recovered my initial investment in time saved. If you're using React or Vue, it is a no brainer - support if first class (along with Headless UI). I actually pivoted to SvelteKit, and started using the Tailwind UI HTML components until recently when this dropped: https://github.com/rgossiaux/svelte-headlessui. I now start with the React component.

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.