Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

A web developer’s decision to step away from Tailwind — a popular tool that lets people style websites by stacking lots of tiny classes in their HTML — has turned into a full-blown comment-section identity crisis. In her post, Julia Evans says Tailwind once saved her from total chaos, but after migrating a few sites back to more meaningful HTML and plain CSS, she found the process “so fun and so interesting.” Her big revelation: Tailwind didn’t just style her sites, it quietly taught her systems for colors, font sizes, spacing, and structure that she can now reuse without the tool itself.

But the real fireworks are in the reactions. One camp is basically yelling, “Finally, sanity!” A longtime accessibility advocate argued that Tailwind gets people thinking about looks before meaning, which is a huge red flag for websites that need to work well for everyone, including screen-reader users. Another commenter said newer tools like Svelte — plus the rise of AI coding assistants — wiped out their need for Tailwind entirely, because the main problem was avoiding style collisions in the first place.

Then came the glorious side-eye. One exhausted observer joked that Tailwind’s wild popularity is exactly why they’re happy to work on “boring” cloud systems instead of website interfaces. And in peak 2026 fashion, someone even used the moment to launch a completely separate hot take: why use giant web frameworks at all when an AI can supposedly just write the browser code for you? So yes, this started as a thoughtful post about learning CSS structure — and instantly became a referendum on modern web development, AI hype, and whether the internet has finally had enough of trendy styling cults.