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Do you prefer to use Tailwind in your Phoenix projects? (Poll)

9/8/2025Updated 10/26/2025

Excerpt

I understand the criticisms of Tailwind, but I see it as a nice midway point between bland/difficult to maintain Bootstrap-y component classes and unintuitive, clunky vanilla CSS. ... Then again I haven’t had to professionally maintain CSS in a while, and from what I observe my FE colleagues doing I’m guessing it’s probably a bit in the way. ... Tailwind, as a library, solves three problems: Unfortunately, the utility class approach is fundamentally degenerate: it can never fully express CSS, and CSS is the thing which browser vendors actually support. So you are always playing catch-up. The series of increasingly ridiculous hacks they have come up with to fit CSS into a class-shaped hole is something to behold. First they needed a compiler to strip the unused classes. Then they started dynamically generating styles … `class` attribute without *completely* obliterating the markup (and yet the results are not great). Actually all that is needed is to write normal CSS and then scope it. The components come out looking like this. I’m biased but I think it looks just fine! But more importantly, the class names cannot collide because the selectors are mangled automatically (as opposed to by hand) by the compiler. … `Tailwind` may seem nice at start, but the more complex your template is the worse it looks like. What’s success? It was forced and many posts were created to ask how to get rid of it completely, how to install some CSS framework and so on … The way it was forced is terrible to maintain and customise if you don’t want to use … Yes, you would. Tailwind is essentially a mediocre DSL of CSS. The classes mostly map very closely to CSS, and you will not understand them unless you also understand CSS. This also goes both ways. I have seen people criticize Tailwind by saying it’s “another thing to learn”, which is patently absurd. If you know CSS the meaning of nearly all of the classes is

Source URL

https://elixirforum.com/t/do-you-prefer-to-use-tailwind-in-your-phoenix-projects-poll/72408

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