You're not wrong, and I mostly agree with you. I die inside when I see the div soup that a lot of sites have become. However, I think there is value in being able to have the important parts of CSS merged into the HTML a bit. Where that line is, is certainly up for debate (and I don't have the answer), but I've found a lot of my tailwind sites are more readable to me than my pre-tailwind sites, often because I don't have to context-switch and open a different file to be able to reason about the styling on an element. For big stuff the second file can be nice, but there's a lot of style tweaking that is great to be able to do right there in the HTML. Tailwind does really lead you to ignore the css file though (or keep it highly minimal), which I agree is becoming an anti-pattern.
The "open a different file" reasoning piece is a common pro-Tailwind statement and I do see the upsides.
I think that upside became more prevalent in the reusable components era, whereas previously CSS was targeting an entire HTML file (and thus the reasoning was more like SQL query than "this one element's styling").
With LLMs I think this upside is much smaller now though.
> With LLMs I think this upside is much smaller now though.
With LLMs Tailwind wins. Because it's a very restricted set of classes. With regular "separation of concerns" CSS, LLMs will happily just pile on more and more and more CSS because they can't really analyze the code that's already there, and will miss and re-create huge chunks of CSS. Or write increasingly hyper-specific CSS to fix reported issues.
Anecdotally: in a side project I now have 10k lines of "pure" CSS generated by LLMs on top of Tailwind. The web part of the app is ~20k lines (not all of them are rendering anything on screen). No idea how to fix it :)
It seems that everyone is forgetting the web inspector as a tool for designing web pages. You can tweak properties and styles in a live environment, and then transfer your preferences to the css files.
[dead]
I don't have to context-switch and open a different file to be able to reason about the styling on an element
Unless you're coding on a VT100 terminal, you just put the HTML in one window and the CSS in another. Subdivide as necessary, or as your monitor space allows.
Heck, we were doing that back in 1989 on IBM PCs with MDA displays.
If your CSS is so out of control that you can't wrap your brain around it, it's time to refactor or split into individual CSS component files.
VT100 for life!
But more seriously, I should have been more specific. Having the second file open in a split pain isn't that big of a deal, but having to navigate and find the right selectors can be. If class names are used well then it's pretty easy to find those, but my experience with that is riddled with inconsistency when I'm not the one who wrote it.
On that note, it's also much easier to review CSS changes in pull requests when they are right in line with the file. Otherwise I have to do the same lookup to find the corresponding HTML, and reason about whether the selector could potentially be grabbing things that aren't obvious, etc.
Even if one were limited to a single window, I’d hazard to guess that most modern web frameworks and languages have some degree of templating and pre-processing capabilities, which let you have logically contained files with HTML and CSS that decompose/render into separate files.
I’ve made setups like that on a number of projects (ASP.Net & various .Net web frameworks). keeping clean separation of concerns, proper cascading, but also a simplified development experience where the ‘component’ file contained all relevant code, markup, and local styling.
Maybe even split it into a set of small reusable coherent utility classes