Tailwind CSS is one of the latest technologies making its way into the front-end world. As a front-end developer, my natural inclination was to try this technology when I first heard of it. I believe that every technology has its use case and its disadvantages. And so, it is essential as a developer to look at all the technology you come across from both its negative and positive sides.
Tailwind CSS is a utility framework. It wasn’t created like the other existing CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Material UI with built-in UI components.
Tailwind was built with the artist in mind. It was built to allow the creative part of the developer to come out. The short version is that Tailwind was built to relieve developers from writing many CSS codes and instead work directly on your HTML file without leaving it.
Today we are going to explore why Tailwind CSS is better than other CSS frameworks.
Why you should use Tailwind CSS?
Tailwind CSS is good to use in place of plain CSS because it saves a lot of time and makes it easier to update your UI. I will be sharing some of the reasons I think tailwind CSS is good to use over traditional CSS.
Class names
One of the things I find frustrating about writing custom CSS is having to name the classes. I will be wondering which classes should be specific. Which one should be more generic? Did I organize it well? Tailwind makes all this easy by providing utility classes that can be used all the time. You may only have to name things, which rarely happens when you have to extract a component.
Built-in design
One of the reasons Tailwind is so good is its built-in design, which the configuration files provide. Tailwind CSS configuration files give you a design template to work from. In practice, the design looks better when they have consistent values for sizes, color, etc. Tailwind allows you to change these values up front and make your designs stick to the one Tailwind provides.
Customization
Why Tailwind is good is that it was built with customization in mind. Although it comes with its default configuration, you can easily override this with your project's tailwind.config.js file. Everything from font size to colors to spacing can be customized to suit your needs. This eliminates having to fight the framework to give you the design you want or figure out which classes you need to override to get the results you want.
Easy component creation
Given that Tailwind CSS is a utility CSS framework, it is easy to create custom components from these utilities. I usually extract component classes for inputs and other elements by using the @apply directive. I also use the theme() function inside the CSS files to get values from the config file like fonts and colors instead of hard coding them myself.
Faster development
The overall advantage of why Tailwind is better than other CSS frameworks is that it allows faster development of your project. This is because you don’t have to switch contexts or go to battle with the framework to make all the changes you wish to use. Tailwind provides all the necessary tools you require to build your project without the need to write custom CSS.
Better Convenience
A traditional approach to CSS makes it challenging to design your project because any changes you make on one page could affect another page. However, Tailwind solves this problem by only allowing the changes to affect the templates you are working on. This makes it easier to make changes to one single page without affecting other pages.
Why you should not use Tailwind?
Although Tailwind CSS has listed and shown some amazing advantages to using the framework, it doesn't come all that perfectly. We are going to look at some of the disadvantages of the utility framework.
Difficult to read
If you take a Tailwind CSS project, you will find it difficult to read the code. It is no joke that this framework makes your code a bit messy and unreadable at first. This can discourage people from using this framework, especially if you are picking it up for the first time.
Learning a new way of writing code
When you start using this framework for the first time, it can be a bit challenging. The promise of easy prototyping is not applicable here. You will have to relearn how to write CSS code and get more familiar with the way Tailwind CSS is used.
Conclusion
The advantages and disadvantages listed above were given to help you evaluate whether it's worth it to use this framework on your next project or not. Although no matter what I advise, ultimately, the choice still lies in your hands to decide whether Tailwind CSS is better than other CSS frameworks. At least now, I have given you an answer to why Tailwind CSS is better than other CSS frameworks. If you are already a Tailwind user, you can list some of the advantages or disadvantages that I didn't mention below. I would love to hear from you.
RESOURCES
How to add tailwind CSS colors and Fonts to your project
How to Create React Tabs with Tailwind CSS
Tailwind CSS CDN-How to use the Tailwind CSS JIT CDN
How to use tailwind css padding, margin and border in your project.
How To Use Tailwind CSS In React.
Tailwind Flex: How to use Tailwind CSS Flex
How to create and style a Responsive Form using Tailwind CSS