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Why does Tailwind not build framework agnostic UI components?

The best thing about Tailwind is everyone can use it.

Wish we could go back to the days of building for the web and not building for React.



> Why does Tailwind not build framework agnostic UI components?

For the same reasons that PrimeFaces has PrimeNg (Angular), PrimeReact, and PrimeVue.

Given the way all the different stuff works together, that's the way it has to be done.

I'm still amazed they're asking for $299 for this!

Prime is MIT licensed. "Here, clone our repo on GitHub and do whatever you want!". Professional support is paid.

It looks good, it works, and no, I don't work for them. But $299 for this Tailwind thing seems rather crazy in comparison.

There is also PrimeFlex, which lets you do stuff like:

<div class="shadow-3 m-3 surface-card text-center p-3 border-round-sm h-6rem w-9rem flex align-items-center justify-content-center font-semibold">shadow-3</div>

Which of course looks a lot like working with Tailwind.


> I'm still amazed they're asking for $299 for this!

That’s like the cost of 1 front end developer day, and you get so many useful components + future updates.

If you see it as a business expense it’s great value.


It's terrible value when compared to the other offerings in the market which come as complete JS components and are free.

Also tailwind UI doesn't come with figma designs, whereas all the other free ones do.

You're just paying a brand tax here.


Do the other offerings you're refering to use tailwind css?

In that case I'm also paying for continued development by the tailwind team, unlike the free offerings. I don't mind that free toolkits use tailwind, that's the beauty of the MIT license, but I do value paying something to the creators to ensure continued development. Especially if my business makes enough money from it.


I use PrimeVue, which offers it's components in Tailwind, Bootstrap, and their own CSS framework. They also offer all the components as figma files and provide actual documentation of each component unlike tailwinds 3 lines of comments for each component.

NB. I've paid for both tailwind UI and PrimeBlocks.


> I'm still amazed they're asking for $299 for this!

Because building things costs money


> Because building things costs money

I already addressed this in my post.

PrimeTek's web component libraries are MIT licensed. They seem to still be going strong after 15 years.

This, apparently, is quite doable.


It's doable if it's not your primary business, and you're willing to put in lots of hours for no compensation.

Others don't want to do that.


> Why does Tailwind not build framework agnostic UI components?

They do. As part of the original TailwindUI product you get UI component templates where you can choose between React, Vue or plain HTML (= framework agnostic!) versions of the source.

However the React version is essentially a big monolithic template, which is what they are trying to address with Catalyst, where those templates are being split up into components (+ other improvements).


Yes… but that isn’t possible in a meaningful way.

Many other UI frameworks such as kendo have tried this and failed, and gone back to variants for each UI framework.

Really, if you want meaningful integration with a ui library it has to natively support that library.

I mean certainly I would be delighted if they’d figured out a way to do this, but it’s unsurprising they didn’t: it’s just a very very difficult problem to solve, and the only really decent effort at it (web components) has had extremely limited support and enthusiasm from the community, and has some reasonably unsolvable technical limitations.

Someone needs to invent a way of doing that that works before you could reasonably expect people to start building frameworks with it.


Like say plain old web components?




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