If you think tailwind is an anti-pattern - you must have missed the CSS in JS ‘hype’… CSS-in-JS - Wikipedia
Like most, I thought tailwind looked a bit rough - but after only a few hours using it - I have become a convert.
Even the creator of tailwind agrees at first glance it does not look good:
I’ve written a few thousand words on why traditional “semantic class names” are the reason CSS is hard to maintain, but the truth is you’re never going to believe me until you actually try it. If you can suppress the urge to retch long enough to give it a chance, I really think you’ll wonder how you ever worked with CSS any other way.
They have an entire carousel on the tailwind site of testimonials of folks who thought it weird at first sight but once using it recognize its’ potential.
Tailwind lets you make style changes without ever opening a css file. I think most people agree that HTML + CSS + JS all fall into the UI concern category - and as demonstrated with CSS in JS - it is not an anti pattern to mix these together. Tools like alpine take it a step further, and all UI concerns live in your HTML.
I think one lesson from tailwind is that technologies like LESS/SASS are falling out of favour and are being replaced with PostCSS - PostCSS - Wikipedia
The phoenix team should consider adopting postcss + some plugins and removing node-sass + sass-loader. That would make adopting tailwind a lot easier than it is today.
When migrating phoenix to webpack 5, might be worth also tackling this^
Am fighting a bit with a webpack5 + tailwind phoenix setup currently - could make a PR if things stabilize a bit. Might still be too early for webpack 5…
Yea including it in phoenix is probably not the best idea - but making adopting it easier would be nice..
