Picked Tailwind over a custom CSS framework for our tool and now second guessing it

We were building this internal dashboard for tracking inventory at our warehouse, nothing fancy just something to help the guys on the floor. I had to choose between going with Tailwind or rolling our own tiny CSS framework with some BEM style classes. I picked Tailwind because I thought it'd be faster to prototype with and everyone online loves it. Six weeks in and my HTML files look like a mess of utility classes and the other devs keep asking where specific styles are defined. The worst part is the build setup keeps breaking on our older laptops that run Windows 7 still. Has anyone else switched from a utility first system to something more traditional mid project? How did you handle the transition without losing your mind?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_piper9d ago

Did you try telling the team to keep everything in one CSS file for a while and just handwrite the styles for new pages? That helped us slow down and stop leaning on Tailwind so hard without having to redo all the old work at once. We slowly moved components over by just adding a class here and there when we touched a page for bug fixes.

anthony1659d ago

Holding on, is it really that deep though? You picked a tool that saves time writing utility classes and now the HTML is messy - welcome to web development. Six weeks in and Windows 7 laptops are the breaking point? That sounds more like an IT problem than a Tailwind problem. The build setup breaking on ancient hardware is going to happen with almost any modern tool, not just Tailwind. Maybe just accept that your HTML is going to look ugly and move on with your life instead of rewriting everything.