It’s naming one component, perhaps a sidebar, versus naming the fifteen children of the sidebar and their state transitions, in a way that’s consistent with the other 137 components that comprise your app.
It’s not about not being able to name all these things, it’s that it’s pointless to do so.
You don't need to name subcomponents in a way that is consistent with the rest of the app, or even at all. That's what nesting is for. You can use simple names, or anonymous tags, that don't overlap because they live in a top level component with its own class/id.
Isnt that what scoping is for? So you name you conponent and use selectors for styling sub components.
My issue with most styling is that they want to use composition when it does not make any sense. Like spliting styles and using the pieces on things that has no relation to each other. If two things are not likely to change together, you shouldn’t use the same class for them, unless you consider the class as primitive.
Tailwind is an extreme case of this, and like all extreme things, it’s a path to ruin.
> If two things are not likely to change together, you shouldn’t use the same class for them, unless you consider the class as primitive.
That is exactly the kind of dogma that I'm referring to—Tailwind makes thinking about that pointless. You apply style composition to achieve the result you want to achieve; not more, not less.
> Tailwind [is] a path to ruin.
Well, I can only speak from the experience of quite a few very successful projects relying on Tailwind: They look consistent, development is easy, style bundling an issue unheard of, and making changes to the design system requires a single line in the config file. New developers are productive from day one, there's no bike-shedding over the styles, and nobody adds ad-hoc colors they just pulled out of their hat.
I get your point, but isn't this contingent on the colors and other properties being stable? I don't see why this can't be achieved with pure CSS instead of adding a (big) set of names as a layer of abstraction and then optionally pruning the build for performance.
Because consistency is achieved only at UI design time (see design system). Unless you're prototyping your design at development time, I don't really see the improvements compared with Pure CSS.
> style bundling an issue unheard of
But then you need to have a component system to have any benefit from that (if you're using the raw classes name from Tailwind). Which was easily done with just naming the component (class or ID) either automatically or not.
> Because consistency is achieved only at UI design time (see design system). Unless you're prototyping your design at development time, I don't really see the improvements compared with Pure CSS.
So, every class now repeats the same properties and values (because CSS has no mixins or composition), there are dozens of classes that try to replicate scoping and nesting through BEM or similar, styles are completely divorced from actual components where they are used...
This is what I highlighted in a previous comment. If you have a drop shadow or some padding on a component, that does not mean another component which have the same values automatically have a relation between them. So it’s mostly a syntactic shortcut at this point. And the end result has no semantics.
I've not used Tailwind yet, so please forgive me for not knowing how you achieve these things with it.
As I understand it, you add a drop-shadow to an element by writing a bunch of classnames that hook into Tailwind and apply the styles. If you want several components to use the same drop shadow, how do you _not_ repeat all those classes on all those components? If you are repeating the classnames, you're just pushing the "problem" of repeating your style rules out to the components. I'm sure there's a Tailwind way to solve this, but I don't know what it is yet.
My experience with several UI libraries and general react usage suggests you might make a new component (`<CompanyApprovedShadow/>) that applies the drop-shadow, and then each component which wants the shadow would use `<CompanyApprovedShadow/>`. But what if one's an `article`, another a `button` etc? What if one's blue and another's red? This gets complicated real fast and/or you end up with so may properties on your style components for customisation that you've lost the benefit you originally sought.
The point of repeating style directives under different classnames, in raw CSS, is that you often want to customise things. The shared values should be provided by the cascade, or variables/--custom-properties.
```
.company-button,
article,
.card {
box-shadow: whatever;
}
```
Is pretty reasonable CSS, imo. I confess I've not used this in a large project, but _every time_ I use something like styled-components, and most UI toolkits, as soon as I have to customise something I wonder why I've agreed to the abstraction.
And we know that it never worked well. That's why BEM and many other naming strategies exist: to try and replicate scoping purely through naming discipline.
> That was nesting, IIRC. Sugar syntax, so you don’t have to fully specified the whole selector.
Nesting partly solves the naming and the "keep all of a component's style close together".
Because you honestly don't need to, and shouldn't need to.
CSS missed out on scoping, nesting, and composition even though most of these things have been available elsewhere (notably, SASS) for 20 or more years.
What you really want is to have a component and all styles scoped to it. In the absence of that you want as few names replicating scoping, nesting, and composition, as possible. And you want to compose repeatable patterns across all of your components (something that is possible with mixins, and is impossible with vanilla CSS). So you cut down on repetition across class names until you're left with utility classes and a separation of concerns that cuts a different way: https://x.com/simonswiss/status/1664736786671869952
Note: no one is stopping you from having your own arbitrary classes when you need to. See e.g. Cube CSS approach https://piccalil.li/blog/cube-css/
What I’m arguing about is that composition isn’t necessary in most cases. Because all components evolve independently. Also nesting is syntactic sugar, nice, but orthogonal to these discussions. And scoping is done with selectors.
CSS isn’t an imperative language. It’s a declarative one. And what’s most important is understanding what it is trying to solve (mostly not styling elements with tag’s style). Which is what Tailwind is replicating.
Tailwind may help you in some cases, but not because of a defect in CSS. It’s like using an ORM, then past a certain treshold, you find yourself doing (badly) SQL but in $language.
> What is it with you and nesting? We were talking about scoping styles to a component.
I get where you coming for. But the issue that the scoping[0] you're referring to on your other comment is something I've never encountered or heard someone complain about.
In my mental model, an element owns it subtree in terms of styling. Meaning that, if I a component can be placed either statically or dynamically, then it belongs to all the elements that may be its parent. And if it want independent styles, then I reset it at the root of the component. So I assumes, any style property that is not set at the root of any element is inherited from the parent.
No need for elaborate syntax and mechanisms that just drive up the complexity of the code.
> But the issue that the scoping[0] you're referring to on your other comment is something I've never encountered or heard someone complain about.
Why do you think BEM exists? Or CSS-inJS? Why do you think web components exist?
All these are attempts to actually do what you claim css is already doing: to make sure that the element owns its subtree in terms of styling.
CSS is global.
> So I assumes, any style property that is not set at the root of any element is inherited from the parent.
Of course not. The hint is in the name: Cascading stylesheets. Your "owned" subtree is owned by every single element above up to and including document root.
> No need for elaborate syntax and mechanisms that just drive up the complexity of the code.
There's nothing complex about Tailwind. It actually reduces all the complexity to a set of small primitives. And since it's still CSS, you can write your own CSS as you wish.
