Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
In a blog post on her personal site, Julia Evans describes her decision to stop using Tailwind CSS and instead adopt a more structured approach to writing CSS. She outlines her new system, which involves creating utility classes for common styles (like spacing and typography) and organizing component-specific styles into separate files. Evans emphasizes the importance of naming conventions and grouping related styles together. She notes that this change has made her CSS easier to maintain and debug, as she can now quickly locate and modify styles without relying on long strings of utility classes in HTML. The post also discusses her use of CSS custom properties and a simple naming methodology to keep styles consistent across projects. Evans acknowledges that Tailwind can be useful for rapid prototyping but found that for her long-term projects, a more structured approach leads to cleaner code and better collaboration with other developers.
Offers a practical alternative to utility-first CSS frameworks for developers seeking better long-term maintainability.