Adam Wathan - Tailwind CSS: It looks awful, and it works - Rails World 2023

In his talk at #RailsWorld, Tailwind CSS creator @AdamWathan of @TailwindLabs will explain why “separation of concerns” isn’t the right way to think about the relationship between HTML and CSS, why presentational class names lead to code that’s so much easier to maintain, as well as loads of tips, tricks, and best practices for getting the most out of Tailwind CSS.
Links:
rubyonrails.org/
tailwindcss.com/
#RailsWorld #RubyonRails #Rails #railwindcss #tailwind #frontend
Thank you Dell APEX for sponsoring the editing and post-production of these videos. Visit them at: dell.com/APEX

[@ruslansteiger]

Data attributes, data attributes, DATA ATTRIBUTES 😂

[@simonswiss]

Great talk, Adam 👊 Also holy crap, you look FIT AF 🔥

[@MickaelChanrion]

Right?! 😮

[@wkjagt]

It's because he's been doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

[@bezludny]

That's what happens when you write a lot of CSS classes.

[@mirasmustimov1504]

Fantastic talk! I found myself enjoying styling html after I started using tailwind. And it is so productive! Love it!

[@bensales20]

2024 - this talk is still amazing

[@JacquesvanWyk]

Tailwind to me does not look ugly. Great job. Learn a few tricks here.

[@dream_emulator]

This is another GREAT presentation from this Rails day. Next time I got to be there!

[@jp2886]

Still not convinced - CSS in HTML so why not just do CSS? And classical Wathan - use divs and ps because why not to ignore semantic tags and screen-readers.

[@Meuhandle]

there's no debating that you get shit done fast with tailwind, but the guy vomiting a div soup in front of professional web developers made me cringe a bit.

[@PensarXYZ]

wow! I will use Tailwind for my next project. Super cool demo.

[@tomasvalent3876]

I thought I know Tailwind but every time I watch any of Adam's videos I learn something new 😮( he has a KZbin channel, I recommend checking it out)

[@krisvanderven2367]

I used it and I love and hate it. I love the utility classes, I hate the readability. I hate how you micro manage the browser, instead of let the browser do the heavy lifting. Probably works great in react where everything is a component, even your link and button. But when it's not, changing the color of a button or a link can be a little more hassle.

[@switzerland]

For the edgy ones out there. I complement bootstrap with tailwind. Tailwind get it's own scope with tw- and I love it.

[@mooktakim]

Devs that grew up with React are fine with this. Inline all the things.

[@SandyVanderbleek]

what is he using in vscode for the browser preview? I can't find the extension

[@kengreeff]

So good! So many tricks in this one.

[@wbjxfkwsklejfde34d]

Interesting talk. Some people find this awesome, and thats great. I've recently inherited a rails/tailwind client and its pretty bad. For example, the developer struggled to maintain consistency, because everything is inlined. Extracting page content into a cms requires deleting all the classes and applying the styles in css. Its more complicated to figure out what has broken when something goes wrong. Stylisticly I'm not a fan, because I dont want my templates extra complicated. Styling/CSS isnt the only thing that needs thinking about in a template and its much better for me to keep that away in a css file, making the erb templates more readable. Just my 2c.

[@codedusting]

Pretty sure there is some vscode plugin or something out there that can help with this problem...

[@wbjxfkwsklejfde34d]

@@codedusting not really no.

[@jeffhicks6068]

What VSCode extension is used for the preview?

[@codedusting]

Search tailwind in extension and look for the official tailwind intellisense one.

[@heyimamaker]

How else can you tell that Adam Wathan is Canadian? Only Canadians would get this reference "It looks awful, and it works"

[@_mball_]

I get it. It's an awesome idea, but it still feels hard to maintain consistency. Partials are a good tool, and using this with WebComponents does make sense to me. View Helpers also feel like a good too. Still, I can't help but read the code and have to spend a lot of time parsing the sum total of CSS properties... There's an entirely new syntax of kind-of-but-not-quite class definitions.

[@nabeel-shakeel]

Nice talk! Really enjoyed it

[@bastost]

Tailwind is amazing! Thanks!

[@atom6_]

i am using vimesh style - which is fully compatible with tailwind, except it is a javascript library, only 30KB. Together with alpinejs, extremely powerful. No more "building" stuff (which i truly hate).

[@DenisSoloshenko]

Great talk!

[@Raubritterr222]

The best part of Tailwind -- you don't need to come up with those pesky names for CSS classes!

[@xiaohui-dev]

What extension makes erb to be previewable?

[@MassimoDeMarchiyolo]

I was wondering that too!

[@DaronSpence]

It's the built in VScode preview server. You can tell it to render any arbitrary URL and reload when a file changes.

[@xiaohui-dev]

@@DaronSpence at 13:19 I noticed the command is Responsive Preview: Open URL, seems it's not a built in VScode which name is Simple Browser(I guess you were saying this)

[@klanowicz]

Please ping me of anyone will find it 🙏

[@FirstWeGolf]

Trying to use it but buggered if I can get it working

[@dorstox]

This modern frontend styling is making my head spin. I'm a Laravel developer and tried and failed to like tailwind so many times! This video did not win me over. Until something easier comes around, I'll be using bootstrap, bulma or better yet rely on frontend colleagues. It's gotten complicated and there is a lot to memorize, even with the fancy autocompletion of the IDE.

[@FranciscoQuintero]

It's fine. You use what makes you most productive.

[@sheldon98c]

When I started using flexbox and grid I feel like superman. Than I started using them in tailwind now I feel like Voldemort with infinite powers.

[@dream_emulator]

👏👏👏

[@rajeshbudhathoki7888]

Then I got here!

[@cristianbilu]

Talwindcss is ugly, but readable and declarative. And for me, that’s a win

[@dominuskelvin]

I got here first 😌

[@samuelkamau1550]

and that's how i became third😄

[@Alex-lu4po]

To me you are first.

[@ScottHillson]

A horrible solution in need of a problem.

[@user-xedwsg]

correct.

[@MrGeorgeTheCat]

Why not just use the style attribute and have some helper classes for the magic. I would like to see all examples compared to that.

[@TheCebulon]

I tried it - and I really, really don’t like it!

[@erictwilegar]

We have trapped ourselves in a prison made of html and css.

[@CraigMcNicholas]

Thanks I hate it.

[@alexeybobr4537]

It looks like more brutal version of bootstrap for me. Not sure how to memorize all these classes.

[@codedusting]

You don't. Vscode has a plugin so does prettier for sorting the classes for consistency and jetbrains has its own plugin.

[@jamescattanach1129]

So rails goes to great lengths to provide maintainable html and you've just totally gone against the grain. Perhaps it would be better if you actually understood exactly what Rails is about before presenting this. It's definitely not for me

[@railsofficial]

Hi James, please keep it friendly. Adam is well aware of what Rails is about. It might not be for you, but he was invited to speak at Rails World and we understood beforehand what his talk was going to be about. - Amanda, Rails Foundation

[@jamescattanach1129]

Nothing unfriendly to see here 😊

[@mauriciomdea]

No, thanks.

[@penn_robotics]

Ah yes, ... certainly WAAAYY more readable than 💍💍💍🎪

[@aniforprez]

yes actually

[@MickaelChanrion]

6 months later, tell me what css is applied to this without opening the css file that applies its style. Heck, if not even multiple files. Just one of the many benefits from using this mean tailwind! ☺️

[@jl789nz]

I don't think any one said it was more readable. Declarative naming also has it's own readability issues. I'm still not fully sold on Tailwind. It does help solve some issues, but it also comes with its own issues. It's trade offs all the way down.

[@MickaelChanrion]

I'd say it's not readable but discoverable

[@manojlds]

​@@MickaelChanriondoesnt it make the html template itself worse. To grok it you need more cycles now.