The 'T' in Tailwind is for... and Fantasy Workstations
Hey friends,
I've decided that age is relative, not a number... and this week I feel OLD. Old in the sense that you swing some kettlebells and THIS week, unlike all the other weeks, your body decides to become very angry about it 👴. You know what else makes me feel old? The Matrix is 25 years old this year... 1999 baby. 😎💊
Whew...
Thinking Too Hard
I came across several articles last week about how Tailwind is bad and wrong and makes people really angry.
I dislike sensationalism. I do not think Tailwind SOLVES CSS (far from it, actually) but I feel obligated to provide a few counter points that don't seem to get mentioned often:
- Tailwind is best used by TEAMS, not individuals.
- Tailwind improves long-term maintenance for TEAMS with it's tree-shaking only-what-you-need compilation.
- Tailwind removes arbitrary naming and ordering arguments for TEAMS.
- Tailwind helps TEAMS avoid writing same-but-slightly-different rules thanks to the config file and IntelliSense completion.
- Tailwind can provide a unifying layer across several different technologies (JS, Ruby, PHP, whatevs) for a TEAM that has to hop between them.
- Tailwind is best used as a TEAM-mate with with other tools in areas it is weak (ok ok, I'm stretching the bit here).
We might as well call it TEAMwind, because that's the use-case that it shines in. If you're not using it in a team, as many of it's loudest detractors seem to be, then you really should use CSS. It's not CSS on training-wheels, it's an advanced friction-remover for TEAMS to focus on what matters.
Perhaps I'll expand on this soon, but like the folks at HTMX say :
Interesting Web Bits
- I think it's more than just 90% of designers are unhirable, I think this is universal. We don't like exposing the rough bits of a project but THOSE are the parts that are really interesting. (And hey, I'm just as guilty of selectively polishing too...)
- Nikita's favorite animation trick: exponential smoothing
- Michelle Barker explores the new CSS color-mix() function. It's still hard to believe we can actually use OKLCH in production now...
- Stephanie Eckles talks about her 12 favorite CSS one-line upgrades.
- Lucas Pope (maker of Papers, Please and the Return of Obra Din) released his new game, Mars after Midnight coming out for the Playdate.
New creator-based releases this week:
Phew, there's a lot for creators this week!
- Downpour, is a hypercard-esque tool that helps people make their own custom experiences. It's pretty neat, there's some fun stuff on there already.
- Pixi releases v8. If you haven't used Pixi, it's a great
canvashelper library. Check out some examples - Lexaloffle (makers of PICO-8) are releasing a new 'fantasy workstation' called Picotron for pixel games, art, and 'other curiosities'. I'll be interested to see how this progresses.
- The Phaser team has released an integrated PWA documentation/code explorer called, aptly, Explorer and is perhaps the nicest API documentation I have ever seen.