Looking at the Tailwind 3.2 feature list I don't necessarily disagree that some of these look like feature creep, but I think this article falls flat because it asserts a premise that I just don't think is true:
> the idea behind Tailwind, like every other utility-first CSS framework, is to make styling easier, especially for front-end developers who dislike getting under CSS’s hood.
> The more features that get added to Tailwind, the more you have to know about CSS before you can use those features. Right? So why not just bite the bullet and learn to use CSS without the additional tooling
Tailwind is not an alternative to learning CSS, or "getting under CSS's hood", and I don't think I've ever seen anyone promote it as such. Tailwind is explicitly very low-level. It's an alternative way to write CSS, not an alternative to knowing CSS. All of its class documentation starts with the exact equivalent CSS declarations for a reason.
Exactly. Tailwind's utility classes correspond 1-1 with CSS attributes more or less. Then you have variants to help you target things like hover and focus states as well as pseudo elements like before and after. But Tailwind does nothing to hide away CSS in that you still have to understand flex and grid layouts, padding, z-indexing, margins, etc.
What Tailwind does give you is a way to build on top of a design system. The Tailwind config gives you a pretty good default design system in terms of spacings (padding and margins), colours (palettes and shades), etc. And you are free to modify or make your own design system, but once you do your design is much more likely to be consistent.
You can of course achieve the same design system with css custom properties (aka variables), but you have to be much more cognisant of using them. With Tailwind the design system is the default and you have to go out of your way to use custom values.
> the idea behind Tailwind, like every other utility-first CSS framework, is to make styling easier, especially for front-end developers who dislike getting under CSS’s hood.
> The more features that get added to Tailwind, the more you have to know about CSS before you can use those features. Right? So why not just bite the bullet and learn to use CSS without the additional tooling
Tailwind is not an alternative to learning CSS, or "getting under CSS's hood", and I don't think I've ever seen anyone promote it as such. Tailwind is explicitly very low-level. It's an alternative way to write CSS, not an alternative to knowing CSS. All of its class documentation starts with the exact equivalent CSS declarations for a reason.