7 ms·

Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Sin

by gibbitz 3mo ago

Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.

avindrag 3mo ago
> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.
- Gualdrapo 3mo ago
  But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS. That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    You absolutely have to know how CSS layout works to do anything even marginally complicated with Tailwind. It's not a replacement for building flexbox layouts or dealing with Z-indexes or knowing how to compose elements for different viewport sizes. All it's actually separating you from is (most of) the "Cascading" part and having your styles separate from you elements.
- stackghost 3mo ago
  >Bootstrap ships components. I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.
  - alexchantavy 3mo ago
    I miss that 2010s startup look
    - girvo 3mo ago
      That lobster font we all used for our startup names was legendary
      - gfat 3mo ago
        lobster.ly
  - youngtaff 3mo ago
    Bootstrap was originally built so internal Twitter apps had a decentish UI
- elicash 3mo ago
  Here's the discussion we had about bootstrap 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413 (The underlying webpage is no longer around. But the HN discussion is.)
  - ivewonyoung 3mo ago
    The underlying webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventureg...
crooked-v 3mo ago
Writing CSS from scratch sucks. I'm glad we've left those days far behind.
- emodendroket 3mo ago
  Also let's not pretend like typical efforts were not buggy as hell with oversights or tricks that didn't work in every environment.
- wild_egg 3mo ago
  Modern CSS is actually really quite pleasant.
  - ryanbrunner 3mo ago
    It's great for document formatting. For app layout, it's very easy for the cascading aspect to shoot you in the foot if you're not careful (which is why even the most purist CSS writers will tend to layer abstractions or rules on top of it, even if it's only convention based ones without technology like BEM.
    - wild_egg 3mo ago
      Emphasis on the modern CSS. @layer, @scope, etc. go a long way in fixing the footguns.
JimsonYang 3mo ago
Bingo! People mustve forgotten about the bootstrap era
- timr 3mo ago
  Well there you go. If you want to differentiate yourself today, just use bootstrap!
  - ceritium 3mo ago
    My trick, I just use bootstrap, ask Claude for a custom Styles following a style, palete etc. Much better experience than buying and adapting and existing bootstrap theme
iamsaitam 3mo ago
What a bunch of nonsense. Tailwind doesn't come with components.
- ffsm8 3mo ago
  You're technically wrong, because you're not precise enough •́ ‿ , •̀ https://tailwindcss.com/plus https://tailwindcss.com/plus But yeh, they aren't the thing we're talking about here.
homebrewer 3mo ago
And for some reason you're describing it as it's a bad thing. I don't care much for tailwind, but bootstrap is still used for intranet applications, and is an excellent pick in that category. Why waste time writing CSS, reimplementing what has been done millions of times before you, when working on an application where function has strict precedence over form? I'd rather listen to users who fill hundreds of forms daily, understand where they struggle, and spend effort on optimizing their workflow than on pointless eye candy. (In my experience, it's never been "this doesn't look as good as the latest version of Discord", or whatever.)
- gibbitz 3mo ago
  Muzak isn't what most people choose to listen to. I'm not bemoaning the use/existence of the tool, I'm bemoaning what it did to the internet and taste making. We accept boring competence in web design like we accept weird outlet placement in our homes. The signal it sends is that it doesn't matter and as a result many in this thread (and web users in general) believe it. We've been bemoaning the death of the internet lately. AI gets a lot of displaced credit for this, but the Internet died because we stopped bringing creativity. Not just in look and feel, but in content, business ideas etc. In many cases we let walled gardens limit our ability to be creative for convenience (Facebook pages vs VPS hosting for example). The internet stopped being for consumers and started being for businesses. Developers get easy frameworks/platforms so that businesses get a low price point and the customer gets what they get (as though this wasn't to serve them to begin with). If they pay for it, it must be good, right? Why do something new?
  - ryanbrunner 3mo ago
    I like predictable UI even if it's a little "boring" because given the choice between utility and style, I'll choose utility every time. It is possible to make stylish things that also have very high utility, but it's a lot harder than favoring one, and I will always favor utility. Take the author's example in this article - he calls out two things more than anything - a single sentence "pitchy" description of the product, and plan cards that look and feel extremely samey from site to site. I'd argue that both of these "downsides" are an upside for me as a consumer: - Having a one sentence quick summary of what a product does allows me to make a quick decision about whether I'm interested in reading more about this product. - Consistent plan cards lets me leverage my shared understanding of how plan cards work to instantly answer questions like what the monthly / annual pricing is like, what tiers are available, etc, that a bespoke presentation would require me to think about. If I come to a landing page for a product, I'm more interested in answering questions like "is this a product I would like" and "how much does it cost" than appreciating the design of a page.
trueno 3mo ago
i feel like this isn't a tailwind problem it's the homogenization of component libraries like shadcn daisyui etc. all remarkably boring, pair that with the field of ui/ux thinking landing pages that say nothing at all and you get a million webpages that look the same. every sass does this. in fact, every saas had a slop feeling to it because of this before AI took off. before chat friggen jippity and now claude and gemini were ubiquitous, i was regularly rolling my eyes at every. single. saas. website. all the examples in OP don't look like a tailwind specific thing to me at all. they look like a broader boring internet-webdev equivalent to live laugh love pinterest home interior designs that predates the AI slopfest. this is the web styling VC's have been demanding from the startups they've invested in for many years now. as far as tailwind goes, it's more like a utility set of classes but i see no reason why you can't get creative with it. feel like it's catching strays here simply because everyone's vibe coding and it's a common path for trained models to choose but that really says not a lot about tailwind and a whole lot about how people are choosing to use tailwind. it's not like tailwinds providing a breadth of components or is locking in certain stylistic elements. it's just that everyone's making the same choices because everyone's slopping their front ends.

by gibbitz 3mo ago

avindrag 3mo ago

> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.

Gualdrapo 3mo ago
But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS. That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  You absolutely have to know how CSS layout works to do anything even marginally complicated with Tailwind. It's not a replacement for building flexbox layouts or dealing with Z-indexes or knowing how to compose elements for different viewport sizes. All it's actually separating you from is (most of) the "Cascading" part and having your styles separate from you elements.
stackghost 3mo ago
>Bootstrap ships components. I haven't used it in ages, but it used to be that Bootstrap also shipped drop-in CSS that would give you decent-looking styles on all the common elements, so a single minified style sheet would give you that classic "2010s startup" look.
- alexchantavy 3mo ago
  I miss that 2010s startup look
  - girvo 3mo ago
    That lobster font we all used for our startup names was legendary
    - gfat 3mo ago
      lobster.ly
- youngtaff 3mo ago
  Bootstrap was originally built so internal Twitter apps had a decentish UI
elicash 3mo ago
Here's the discussion we had about bootstrap 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287413 (The underlying webpage is no longer around. But the HN discussion is.)
- ivewonyoung 3mo ago
  The underlying webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160325181748/http://adventureg...

crooked-v 3mo ago

Writing CSS from scratch sucks. I'm glad we've left those days far behind.

emodendroket 3mo ago
Also let's not pretend like typical efforts were not buggy as hell with oversights or tricks that didn't work in every environment.
wild_egg 3mo ago
Modern CSS is actually really quite pleasant.
- ryanbrunner 3mo ago
  It's great for document formatting. For app layout, it's very easy for the cascading aspect to shoot you in the foot if you're not careful (which is why even the most purist CSS writers will tend to layer abstractions or rules on top of it, even if it's only convention based ones without technology like BEM.
  - wild_egg 3mo ago
    Emphasis on the modern CSS. @layer, @scope, etc. go a long way in fixing the footguns.

JimsonYang 3mo ago

Bingo! People mustve forgotten about the bootstrap era

timr 3mo ago
Well there you go. If you want to differentiate yourself today, just use bootstrap!
- ceritium 3mo ago
  My trick, I just use bootstrap, ask Claude for a custom Styles following a style, palete etc. Much better experience than buying and adapting and existing bootstrap theme

iamsaitam 3mo ago

What a bunch of nonsense. Tailwind doesn't come with components.

ffsm8 3mo ago
You're technically wrong, because you're not precise enough •́ ‿ , •̀ https://tailwindcss.com/plus https://tailwindcss.com/plus But yeh, they aren't the thing we're talking about here.

homebrewer 3mo ago

And for some reason you're describing it as it's a bad thing. I don't care much for tailwind, but bootstrap is still used for intranet applications, and is an excellent pick in that category. Why waste time writing CSS, reimplementing what has been done millions of times before you, when working on an application where function has strict precedence over form? I'd rather listen to users who fill hundreds of forms daily, understand where they struggle, and spend effort on optimizing their workflow than on pointless eye candy. (In my experience, it's never been "this doesn't look as good as the latest version of Discord", or whatever.)

gibbitz 3mo ago
Muzak isn't what most people choose to listen to. I'm not bemoaning the use/existence of the tool, I'm bemoaning what it did to the internet and taste making. We accept boring competence in web design like we accept weird outlet placement in our homes. The signal it sends is that it doesn't matter and as a result many in this thread (and web users in general) believe it. We've been bemoaning the death of the internet lately. AI gets a lot of displaced credit for this, but the Internet died because we stopped bringing creativity. Not just in look and feel, but in content, business ideas etc. In many cases we let walled gardens limit our ability to be creative for convenience (Facebook pages vs VPS hosting for example). The internet stopped being for consumers and started being for businesses. Developers get easy frameworks/platforms so that businesses get a low price point and the customer gets what they get (as though this wasn't to serve them to begin with). If they pay for it, it must be good, right? Why do something new?
- ryanbrunner 3mo ago
  I like predictable UI even if it's a little "boring" because given the choice between utility and style, I'll choose utility every time. It is possible to make stylish things that also have very high utility, but it's a lot harder than favoring one, and I will always favor utility. Take the author's example in this article - he calls out two things more than anything - a single sentence "pitchy" description of the product, and plan cards that look and feel extremely samey from site to site. I'd argue that both of these "downsides" are an upside for me as a consumer: - Having a one sentence quick summary of what a product does allows me to make a quick decision about whether I'm interested in reading more about this product. - Consistent plan cards lets me leverage my shared understanding of how plan cards work to instantly answer questions like what the monthly / annual pricing is like, what tiers are available, etc, that a bespoke presentation would require me to think about. If I come to a landing page for a product, I'm more interested in answering questions like "is this a product I would like" and "how much does it cost" than appreciating the design of a page.

trueno 3mo ago

i feel like this isn't a tailwind problem it's the homogenization of component libraries like shadcn daisyui etc. all remarkably boring, pair that with the field of ui/ux thinking landing pages that say nothing at all and you get a million webpages that look the same. every sass does this. in fact, every saas had a slop feeling to it because of this before AI took off. before chat friggen jippity and now claude and gemini were ubiquitous, i was regularly rolling my eyes at every. single. saas. website. all the examples in OP don't look like a tailwind specific thing to me at all. they look like a broader boring internet-webdev equivalent to live laugh love pinterest home interior designs that predates the AI slopfest. this is the web styling VC's have been demanding from the startups they've invested in for many years now. as far as tailwind goes, it's more like a utility set of classes but i see no reason why you can't get creative with it. feel like it's catching strays here simply because everyone's vibe coding and it's a common path for trained models to choose but that really says not a lot about tailwind and a whole lot about how people are choosing to use tailwind. it's not like tailwinds providing a breadth of components or is locking in certain stylistic elements. it's just that everyone's making the same choices because everyone's slopping their front ends.