Why Tailwind is better then CSS ?

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses must stay ahead of the curve by embracing the latest technology and design trends. One area where this is particularly important is in the realm of CSS frameworks, where modern options like Tailwind have gained significant popularity over traditional CSS. This article aims to compare Tailwind with traditional CSS, shedding light on the advantages of adopting Tailwind.

Moreover, if you’re interested in a comprehensive comparison between Tailwind CSS and another prominent CSS framework, Material UI, we recommend referring to our blog post titled “Material UI vs Tailwind CSS: A Comprehensive Comparison.” This post delves into the nuances, similarities, and distinctions between these two frameworks, assisting you in determining the most suitable choice for your specific requirements.

Now, let’s explore the reasons why Tailwind CSS is an outstanding option for contemporary web development.

What is Tailwind ?

Tailwind CSS is a highly popular utility-first CSS framework that provides a set of pre-designed CSS classes. It differs from traditional CSS frameworks by taking a unique approach to styling websites and applications. Rather than focusing on pre-built components like buttons or cards, Tailwind CSS offers a comprehensive collection of low-level utility classes that can be combined to construct custom designs.

The framework provides a vast array of utility classes that cover various aspects of web development, including layout, typography, colors, spacing, and more. These classes are designed to be directly applied to HTML elements, enabling developers to rapidly style their projects without the need to write custom CSS from scratch.

Traditional CSS vs. Tailwind CSS

When comparing traditional CSS with Tailwind CSS, there are several key differences and benefits that highlight why Tailwind has gained popularity among developers. Here’s a comparison between the two:

Approach to styling:

• Traditional CSS: In traditional CSS, developers typically write custom CSS rules to target specific HTML elements and define their styles individually. This approach requires writing and managing a significant amount of CSS code, which can become complex and time-consuming.
• Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS follows a utility-first approach. Instead of defining custom CSS rules, developers utilize pre-defined utility classes that directly apply specific styles to HTML elements. This approach allows for faster development as it eliminates the need to write custom CSS from scratch.

Design customization:

• Traditional CSS: With traditional CSS, developers have complete control over the design, but it requires writing and managing extensive CSS code to achieve desired styles.
• Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS provides a comprehensive set of utility classes that cover various design aspects. Developers can combine these utility classes to create custom designs while maintaining consistency. It offers easy customization through configuration files, allowing developers to tweak the default theme or add their own custom styles.

Development speed:

• Traditional CSS: Writing traditional CSS from scratch can be time-consuming, especially when styling complex layouts or managing responsive designs.
• Tailwind CSS: By using pre-defined utility classes, developers can rapidly prototype and build websites or applications. The ready-to-use classes eliminate the need for writing repetitive CSS, leading to faster development and reducing the overall time required to style and design the project.

Consistency and scalability:

• Traditional CSS: In traditional CSS, maintaining consistency across a project can be challenging, especially when multiple developers are involved. Ensuring consistent styles and keeping track of class names can become difficult as the project grows.
• Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS promotes consistency by providing a standardized set of utility classes. The predefined class names make it easier to maintain a consistent design throughout the project. Moreover, Tailwind’s utility-first approach scales well, allowing developers to easily add or modify styles without introducing conflicts or bloating the CSS codebase.

Learning curve and documentation:

• Traditional CSS: Traditional CSS requires knowledge of CSS selectors, properties, and their usage. It involves understanding the box model, positioning, and other CSS concepts.
• Tailwind CSS: While familiarity with CSS is still beneficial, Tailwind CSS has a relatively gentle learning curve. Its extensive documentation and intuitive class naming conventions make it easier for developers to understand and utilize the framework effectively.

Benefits of Using Tailwind CSS

• Rapid development: Tailwind CSS enables developers to rapidly prototype and build websites or applications. Its utility-first approach eliminates the need to write custom CSS from scratch, allowing developers to quickly style elements by applying pre-defined utility classes. This speeds up the development process, especially for projects with tight deadlines.
• Consistent design: Tailwind CSS provides a standardized set of utility classes, promoting consistency in design across the project. By utilizing these classes, developers can maintain a cohesive and uniform visual style throughout the website or application. This ensures that elements have consistent spacing, typography, and colors, resulting in a professional and polished look.
• Customizability: Tailwind CSS offers extensive customization options. It provides a default configuration file that allows developers to customize the default theme, including colors, fonts, breakpoints, and more. This flexibility ensures that Tailwind CSS can be tailored to match the specific branding and design requirements of a project.
• Responsive design: Tailwind CSS has built-in support for responsive design. It provides responsive utility classes that allow developers to create layouts that adapt to different screen sizes and devices. By applying these classes, developers can easily implement responsive behavior without writing complex media queries manually.
• Streamlined maintenance: With Tailwind CSS, managing and maintaining styles becomes more streamlined. The use of utility classes makes it easier to understand and update styles across the project. Additionally, Tailwind CSS integrates with PurgeCSS, a tool that removes unused CSS classes, resulting in optimized and smaller CSS bundles, which improves performance.
• Extensive documentation and community support: Tailwind CSS has comprehensive and well-organized documentation, making it easy for developers to learn and utilize the framework effectively. It also has a large and active community of developers who share their knowledge, tips, and best practices. This support ecosystem helps developers find solutions to common problems and stay updated with the latest developments.
• Flexibility and scalability: Tailwind CSS offers a high level of flexibility and scalability. Developers can easily extend or modify the framework by adding their own utility classes or custom styles. This adaptability allows Tailwind CSS to accommodate the specific needs of different projects and scales well as projects grow in complexity and size.

Use of Tailwind in HTML

Now after knowing benefits of Tailwind. We can use Tailwind CDN in the html

<script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script>

just add the above code in the head of html. Now you are ready to use tailwind in your project.

Remember: We are adding tailwind in head because we want to add styles as soon as the page loads. If we add tailwind in bottom. there will be delay in applying tailwind because of this ui shift will be there.

Remember: Tailwind will not slow your application, because tailwind is more faster then traditional CSS.

After adding in HTML.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<meta charset="UTF-8" />
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
		<script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1 class="text-3xl font-bold underline">Hello world!</h1>
	</body>
</html>

Adding customizing your config

As we are using tailwind, There one more benefit of it we can have custom config settings for tailwind

<script>
	tailwind.config = {
		theme: {
			extend: {
				colors: {
					clifford: '#da373d'
				}
			}
		}
	};
</script>

add this below the tailwind CDN in head of HTML.

So your final html file will look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<meta charset="UTF-8" />
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
		<script src="https://cdn.tailwindcss.com"></script>
		<script>
			tailwind.config = {
				theme: {
					extend: {
						colors: {
							clifford: '#da373d'
						}
					}
				}
			};
		</script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1 class="text-3xl font-bold underline **text-clifford**">Hello world!</h1>
	</body>
</html>

For more information about the tailwind or tailwind classes visit there official website Tailwind.com