In the world of front-end React application development Tailwind CSS needs no introduction. The CSS framework is loved among the developer community due to its scalability, flexibility, adaptability, and lightweight nature.
Tailwind simplifies the issue of maintaining CSS with its single-purpose utility classes. So, if you are finding a way to build a responsive and easy-to-maintain web application that works best on any device, Tailwind CSS is the answer.
Currently, the framework is used by more than 261,170 live websites and the number will continue to grow in the near future.
This article will help you to understand the reason behind the popularity of Tailwind CSS and how it solves most of the traditional CSS issues. So let's get started.
Tailwind CSS is a framework for building front-end applications. The utility class framework is designed to empower users to build apps faster and easier.
It can be used to control layouts, colors, spacing, typography, and more. Tailwind enables developers to create custom component designs without leaving HTML. It works by scanning all the HTML files, JavaScript components, and other templates then generating the corresponding styles and finally writing them to the static CSS. Overall, it gives a fast, flexible and reliable experience to the front-end developers while having zero runtime.
Tailwind is a lightweight framework. You can considerably reduce the file size by removing the unused classes in the project using PurgeCSS. That is the reason why Tailwind can be a good choice since it requires the base stylesheet file with a size up to just 27kb.
Like Bootstrap and Materialize CSS, Tailwind doesn’t come up with predefined components. It operates on lower-level components, also called utility classes. These utility classes contain predefined styles that can be applied to an element.
Utility classes simplify the process of building reusable components, help you write clear code, and provide developers with multiple design options for custom web app development.
With a utility-only approach, you don’t need to worry about annoying style conflicts. So, if you have a huge project with large hierarchies of style with nested selectors, then you might want to make changes. These changes can be overridden with the !important, which is not a good idea.
On the contrary, Tailwind helps you to apply styles directly to the things you are styling and you can easily change the styling without affecting the higher-level components.
With traditional styling you need to consider the style and the content while creating classes and even if you have base classes you might need to override them, which can be exhausting because of the following reasons:
Tailwind CSS uses utility classes which means you do not need to name the classes that far. It's easy to use the Tailwind utility classes as the naming is fairly intuitive.
Tailwind allows you to create inline styling without having to create different selectors. For example, if you want to display something on a small screen and the same on a large screen, you will need to create different sets of selectors in the different parts of your CSS which is time-consuming.
It's normal to have the larger HTML file with Tailwind, because of the repetitive nature of utility classes they are quite easy to compress well at the transport layer with the tools like CSSnano and Brotli.
With the compressed CSS file, you don’t have to worry about code splitting and other techniques to reduce production build size, instead, it can be downloaded once and cached till it is redeployed to the site. The small file size improves the data transfer speed and page load performance.
Here we have discussed only a few benefits of the Tailwind CSS framework over the traditional CSS, but as you start using Tailwind you will discover the other benefits too.
The article helps you to get a clear idea about why you should use Tailwind CSS in your next project. The framework offers many advantages over traditional CSS, by improving app development speed, reliability, maintainability, and efficiency. And above all Tailwind has a big ecosystem of UI components and learning resources.
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