Tailwind CSS VS Material UI

In this article, we analyze the usage of String.raw in Tailwindcss source code.

Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework that provides low-level utility classes to help you style your elements directly in your HTML. Unlike traditional CSS frameworks that come with predefined components (like Bootstrap), Tailwind allows you to build custom designs by combining utility classes without writing any actual CSS.

The Tails Open Source Components are a (no-config) copy'n paste free collection of hand-crafted templates and components built in TailwindCSS.

For this project, I used PureScript + React + Tailwind css + shadcn/ui components. I assume you’ve heard of the first two (if not, see PureScript overview). The other two are blessings for the copy-paste-driven development.

Surprisingly, in many projects, I don't really need more than what Jekyll can offer. So, I remain a loyal user. Until recently, I didn't have much to complain about, not until I decided to rebuild poshtui.com with Tailwind CSS. The only way to add Tailwind and Heroicons was through a JavaScript bundler, and I'm no longer used to that approach.

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework to style the component efficiently Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework that allows users to create user interfaces by combining predefined classes through inline styling. Tailwind CSS has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its efficiency and ease in creating beautiful user interfaces.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS offers utility-first styling, enabling full control over your design by using pre-defined classes.

As a developer working with Ruby on Rails and the Phlex framework, I encountered a common pain point: writing Phlex views that are clean, readable, and efficient, while also adhering to RuboCop’s default style guidelines. While RuboCop is a fantastic tool for enforcing coding standards and preventing messy codebases, it can feel a bit restrictive when applied to view code, especially when using frameworks like Phlex along with something like TailwindCSS.

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.

The first tool we’ll look at is Pigment CSS, a zero-runtime CSS-in-JS library built to extract the co-located styles into separate CSS files during the build phase and eliminate the need for runtime style processing.