Thanks for sharing your thoughts everyone. I was curious (and I thought others might be too) because I’m currently working on a FoundationCSS site and the thought of converting it to Tailwind crossed my mind, so I had a chat with my favourite LLM about it.
I initially asked whether there were any tools to convert a Foundation site to Tailwind - it was more involved that I’d have liked so I decided against it for this particular site. However since we were on the topic I thought I’d dive a little deeper as I am yet to use Tailwind and was pretty excited about it when Chris first mentioned it:
My LLM tells me though, that Tailwind isn’t really a CSS framework as such, it’s more a ‘replacement for naming things and managing a separate stylesheet’.
The more we talked about it the more I felt it may not actually be what I want from a CSS framework - we originally hand-coded sites from scratch with our own CSS, and the reason we started using a CSS framework was primarily to remove the headache of browser compatibility: when you used something like Foundation (or Bootstrap) you could be reasonably confident it would work on most browsers (this was particualrly important after responsive design became a thing).
Since the front-end world is very fast-moving, and as some time had passed since Chris first announced adopting Tailwind I wondered whether there were any other modern approaches that would be worth considering. I was told there are:
- Modern CSS with Autoprefixer - the closest thing to pure HTML/CSS but with a modern/safe toolchain.
- UI component libraries (like Shoelace) - the modern, spiritual successors to Bootstrap/Foundation etc
So where do I personally stand right now? I haven’t completely discounted Tailwind - I still want to evaluate it in a little more detail, but I will also look more into the other options. It’s good to know that I won’t be alone if I decide not to use Tailwind!
