What’s next after Tailwind?

With the fear the CSS framework dying, it’s normal to see beyond the horizon

Photo by Winston Chen on Unsplash

I’m sad seeing Tailwind being sold to Shopify due to AI, but it was written on the wall since at least a year. Now that the styling framework is under corporate control (for good and bad), it’s time to see what’s next.

Clearly the future is not selling components when AI can create these for free, less when Nuxt UI and Daisy UI already exist. Given that AI can also spit JavaScript + CSS, the future of development is not asking to design a webpage and wasting millions of tokens on each cosmetic change, but rather how to control the design.

So the question is not “the future of CSS”, because CSS itself has been advancing (at snail pace). It’s more about “what comes after Tailwind”, much like a decade ago the question was “what comes after Bootstrap”.

Styling on the fly, CSS-in-JS

Tailwind CSS was known to have a big problem when being implemented on static web pages: you could only work with the styles the framework gave to you. For example, if you wanted a half-step color like bg-red-550, you had to resort to use your own style, which defeated the purpose.