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Building my site with Tailwind CSS

Samantha Ming on May 06, 2020

This is a 2 part series where I talk about the two main tech I used to build my new website, samanthaming.com. The first one I talked about my ex...

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Pascal Lamers • May 6 '20 • Edited

Great Read ! You mention "Repeating CSS" and " ... One of the biggest annoyance of utility-first is the repeated classes ... ". That got me thinking, have you tried using the @apply feature from tailwind ?
tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-co...

Haven't tried tailwind myself yet, but once I read the docs, I really liked the @apply feature and I can't wait to try it :)

I think you could do

<h1 class="blue-heading">Tibit Title</h1>

.blue-heading {
   @apply bold text-2x text-blue
}

like "grouping" talwind classes

Samantha Ming • May 6 '20

Thanks for reading my article and the positive feedback Pascal 😄

Unfortunately @apply didn't work for me. I'm using stylus with VuePress. Something about the syntax that's not working 😖 But I have used their theme() function and it works perfectly 👍

h1 {
  font-weight: theme('fontWeight.semibold')
}

I'm terrible at naming things, it's one of the reasons I love about Tailwind -- No more class or id names. Instead, I just apply the style directly...and with that comes the benefits of speed and moving very quickly without thinking of class names 😆

Can't wait until you give Tailwind a try! I'm a huge fan 👏

Richard Schloss • May 8 '20 • Edited

@samanthaming , does the @apply statement work if you try specifying the language with the "lang" attribute? I've never tried multiple style blocks in a vue component, so I'm interested to know if this works:

<style lang="css" scoped>
/* Your tailwind css here */
/* Does @apply work here? */
</style>

<style lang="stylus" scoped>
/* Your stylus here (that you already have) */
</style>

Pascal Lamers • May 8 '20 • Edited

I am wondering if the theme () option is helpful when trying to create a darkmode/lightmode feature for a webapp 🤔🤔

Jérémy ROBERT • May 7 '20

Thank you for this interesting article, i love Tailwind ! Do you use PurgeCSS? If yes, I think you should modify this part of your code :

<CustomVueTitleComponent color="blue">
<CustomVueTitleComponent color="red">
<CustomVueTitleComponent color="green">

<!-- CustomVueTitleComponent.vue -->

<template>
  <h1 class="bold text-2x" :class="`text-${color}`"></h1>
</template>

To :

<CustomVueTitleComponent color="text-blue">
<CustomVueTitleComponent color="text-red">
<CustomVueTitleComponent color="text-green">

<!-- CustomVueTitleComponent.vue -->

<template>
  <h1 class="bold text-2x" :class="color"></h1>
</template>

tailwindcss.com/docs/controlling-f...

Samantha Ming • May 7 '20

WOOOO, thanks for introducing me to PurgeCSS 🤩 I'm using VuePress, which uses PostCSS ... but I wonder if it's redundant to have both? -- but they do different things, so maybe I should include it 🤔

Matthew Piercey • May 7 '20

Awesome intro to Tailwind.

It's not for everyone, but like you said, if somebody's willing to put in a bit of work to figure out what all the classes mean, and they want to style their site/app from scratch using little more than their own imagination, there's really no easier/better way.

I'll definitely recommend this article to anybody that has to put up with my use of Tailwind, since I couldn't make a better argument for it myself.

Tailwind makes a daunting task a lot more approachable, and it's probably helped me write more maintainable /less redundant styles (since it's literally right there in the class names what they do, and there's less digging through a bunch of external Sass to find the custom class I needed to use), though I don't think I'd be able to do everything with Tailwind alone. But it's a super helpful tool, regardless.

I use the Tailwind Intellisense and Headwind Class Sorter VS Code extensions (along with a comprehensive Stylelint config) so the styles basically write themselves these days.

JHerseth • May 6 '20

Interesting read. I've used Bulma earlier on small hobby-projects and enjoyed it a lot. Never used Tailwind, but I read through much of the documentation and I liked the concept. Quite a different approach compared to bootstrap and bulma. I really want to try it out once and see if I'm able to at least make something half decent with it (bulma/bootstrap makes it quite easy to make good looking sites imo, but all my sites/projects tend to resemble each other... Probably more a failing on my part than the frameworks though)

Samantha Ming • May 7 '20

Yup, a totally different approach from the standard CSS frameworks. If you have a design in mind, then Tailwind would be a good choice. But sometimes the cookie-cutter approach you get from CSS frameworks is might be what you need. So it really depends on the project. I say give Tailwind a try, and that way you will know which approach is best in which scenario 😊