tailwindcss VS pollen

/* 1. Prevent padding and border from affecting element width. (https://github.com/mozdevs/cssremedy/issues/4) 2. Allow adding a border to an element by just adding a border-width. (https://github.com/tailwindcss/tailwindcss/pull/116) */

A persistent audio player powered by vue and some visuals from tailwindcss, v-tooltip, v-progress, vue-ionicons & xns-seek-bar

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.

I'm ambivalent about Tailwind, but I've used it a lot. I will say the hypothetical advantages are mostly the following:

1. It's a step function over CSS units. This is the biggest strength, just standardizing that your design uses padding of 2, 4, 8px, but not 1px, 3px, or 1.23123em :). It provides more steps than you need, but still it's good that the core of Tailwind is a design system with defined unit and color variables.

2. Some of the utility classes are very helpful. Even as someone who likes writing CSS, it's nice to not need to give something a custom classname just because I want to put margin-top on it. class="mt-4", done.

I think the problem is Tailwind goes too far and tries to replace EVERYTHING with a stack of utility classes.

This works okay in extremely componentized web apps. It's a nightmare if your UI isn't highly componentized. I've seen projects where you make a button by copy pasting this ~80 character string of tailwind classes all over the place, and then changing the color names if you need to. Good luck fixing that when the designer decides that we don't want any buttons to have rounded corners anymore.

Personally I think the best parts of Tailwind are captured in Pollen[1], but I do wish it came with a subset of utility classes for colors, font sizes, margin, padding, and text alignment. I think the hard part is defining which subset is the right subset... I doubt you could find strong agreement from a large majority of developers on that.

1. https://www.pollen.style

Pollen is a new CSS library that does exactly that. Inspired by Tailwind, it takes its best ideas and implements them as a micro-library of CSS variables. With a 1kb core that can be used anywhere, without a buildstep or class naming conventions, it gives us all of the biggest benefits of Tailwind without reinventing how we write CSS.