I feel like these are two very, very different tools. Pico (or something similar) is great for a Just-Works framework where things look simply and nice. For a lot of things, this is good enough.
But Tailwind is for building... anything. It's better to think of it as inline styles with syntactical sugar. Yes, this has historically been something to avoid. But as components become more common, it moves the DRY to the HTML level (rather than CSS classes).
It's not for everyone or everything, but I've loved it. There's a joke that the hardest part of CS is naming things, and this removes having to map classes and IDs across two different files.
That's exactly how I feel. I didn't realize how much of a productivity-stopper class naming was until I stopped doing it. It's amazing how much faster you move.
I entirely agree. They get compared a lot but to me they seem to solving different problems. Pico if you want something asap, and you are ok with sticking with it's opinionated styles. Tailwind if you want control - now, or if not now then later, i.e., you see your application evolving.
Personally for me, the opinionated pico styles don't work because I'm usually building high density interfaces and pico has stuff that I'd consider good for marketing kind of sites, e.g., buttons with large text (I think you can override/add styles but if it comes to that you should reconsider this choice anyway).
Another advantage for tailwind is that I can use to style components from other frameworks to my liking, e.g., skeletonUI or bits-UI.
A common complaint with tailwind is the long class names. While true I think it's unavoidable due to the flexibility it provides. But that's not why it doesn't bother me: the names make sense (like you say) and they're composable, i.e., you can put together or parse these class names piecewise.
PS: I should add that this article is fair in the sense that it doesn't prescribe over another, just shows which is best for what.
If you change the base css variables, you can configure that default spacing and the corresponding ratios stay reasonable. This is how I use picocss for my high density UIs.
CSS as a language is different from the style attributes that you can insert into `style=`, mainly because it's a lot more powerful. You can do things like set a background colour on hover, or apply a style only to the first child element of a parent. None of that is possible with the style attribute.
This is also the key difference between conventional CSS classes and Tailwind - it acts less like a set of predetermined classes, and more like a DSL for directly writing CSS inline in the "class" attribute. The result is arguably less reasonable than directly writing CSS, but on the other hand, it's a lot less boilerplate.
In my experience, it really clicks if you write a lot of components, in which case you've already got a way to reuse your code, and so tailwind fits in really nicely with that. If you're mainly writing whole-page styling, then Tailwind usually results in a lot of repetition and doesn't produce much better results than writing everything in CSS in the first place.
It’s an artfully constrained design system that reduces mental burden.
The main benefit is what you aren’t doing: jumping between css files and html, naming class’s, trying to debug layers of cascading, wondering what other unrelated components will be impacted by a css rule change…
Colors aren’t a great example because those should be set as css variables (dark mode right?). Think about padding: how many layers of margin/padding on parent wrappers is making things look strange?
The drawback is that you end up with an incomprehensible soup of classes on too many html elements, often redefining and redefining rules.
If you work in a highly componentized scenario that’s probably convenient. You don’t have to name things as you would if you were to keep a separate css ruleset and then tie it to the html elements via naming.
Very noisy compared to a disciplined, structured css though. But who has time for that.
And even for colors, the benefit is the consistent color scale. You've only got 10 shades of red, which are all visually distinct. You won't find slightly different RGB values all over your code base each time someone wanted red.
Have to disagree it's a design system - it's basically a theme. Consistent colors, fonts, borders, spacing is handy for sure - but Tailwind is not a great option if you expect to drop it in and have building block components, etc without a lot of work.
I think people should still think of TW as classes, because they are, and it doesn't need to be more complex than that.
Thinking of TW as inline styles is harmful imo, the specificity works differently and there are a number of things that TW offers that isn't possible inline. Plus inline just carries a stigma which helps people dunk unfairly on TW.
The selling point of TW is that it is, effectively, styles. That's what distinguishes it from what I could call just normal CSS. It has value over inline styles -- otherwise it wouldn't exist -- but it's still the same principle.
I maintain OneJS which provides tailwind support for Unity (the game engine). Whenever I need to show people some code examples in Discord, I always use TW instead of, say, raw css, emotion, etc. This is because TW makes it possible to have everything in one file. And the utility classes are so short, it just make more sense to use them to save screen estate.
But Tailwind is for building... anything. It's better to think of it as inline styles with syntactical sugar. Yes, this has historically been something to avoid. But as components become more common, it moves the DRY to the HTML level (rather than CSS classes).
It's not for everyone or everything, but I've loved it. There's a joke that the hardest part of CS is naming things, and this removes having to map classes and IDs across two different files.