HACKER Q&A
📣 rrmdp

Why everybody speaks only about Tailwind, what happened to Bootstrap?


I tried Tailwind, made a simple project with it and I liked.

Recently had the chance to work on a Bootstrap 5 project and I think is really good too.

I see the every single dev speak about Tailwind like if it's the only good framework and Bootstrap is not good any longer.

Why this?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
I use bootstrap for my own projects because I use it to work and don't have to be distracted with yet another framework.

The part of me that likes extreme DSLs gets a bit of a thrill out of Tailwind but Bootstrap is closer to the original intention of CSS but I'd still like to see something that uses modern css features (like calc() and nesting) to build a design system for a site where the classes are mostly semantic.

Trouble is most designers would rather draw one pretty picture at a time than do the systems thinking it takes to make a design system. There's always been a huge mismatch between what CSS offers and what designers want although we've gotten a huge toolbox (40+ spec documents) that let them do what they need, sometimes with some grace.


👤 ZeroGravitas
People don't seem to understand how to customize Bootstrap, so they re-invent the wheel with things like Tailwind.

👤 ChrisArchitect
Ask HN:

👤 Leftium
I personally prefer Bootstrap to Tailwind, but my favorite is https://picocss.com/

Usually, I just want decent-looking default CSS styles. The benefits of a CSS framework have diminishing returns when using frameworks with styles scoped to components (like SvelteKit/Vue/React).

The fact Tailwind removes all styles so you can't even tell a button is a button unless you add classes is annoying. If you know the class names, sometimes it's a little more convenient to add Tailwind classes, but for the most part it just clutters the HTML. And it makes it difficult to update entire "classes" of elements: you have to update each element one at a time.