Breaking changes

Over the 2021 holiday break I am going to try using Tailwindcss on this site so some things may break.

I have been making changes to the site using "standard" CSS via the normal development process and I have already found the experience pretty terrible.

The CSS for this site is spread across multiple files so tracking down where and how to make changes to something specific has been incredibly tedious and each and every small piece has it's own classes associated with it. Layout is also mixed in across multiple files so just trying to establish consistency has been a real challenge.

I don't know what this will mean for speed of workflow because the HTML/CSS is 'rebuilt' each time you save but my hope is that with some of the improvements in Tailwindcss that the process won't be terribly slow.

Tailwindcss

I have been interested in Tailwindcss for a few years now and it's been interesting to see how it has continued to develop and see its adoption increase.

The creator of Tailwindcss, Adam Wathan's blog post about Separation of Concerns was fascinating to read but not something that I can really appreciating without trying it for myself so I am going to try and experiment with it using this site.

I do know that I am already finding even the small amount of CSS for this site to be cumbersome to use and I feel that I am constantly working against the process vs. with it. It may be that I haven't been working in it long enough, but I just don't find it very fun or intuitive and it seems that so much of the power of programming (abstraction, reusability, etc) isn't really available for styling in CSS without a lot of workarounds.

So what working with CSS really feels like is managing a lot of different rules in different files.