Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1

Read some of the Getting Started documentation, for fun. First step:

> Installing with Vite

What the hell is Vite? Oh, it seems to be something you need to install via npm.

I cannot help but to ask - why do we require npm, or Vite, for something that looks like it should "help" with CSS?

Why is the webdev such a shitshow, that seems to get ever deeper into its own weird rabbit hole?

To answer your question sincerely, Tailwind is a series of utility classes that make it easy to author CSS within HTML (pages or components). Back in the day we had many libraries to do this, the most popular was called Bootstrap. It looks like this: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.3.3/dist/css/bootst...

You'll notice that Bootstrap CSS includes every single utility class within Bootstrap. This is fine, but it could be a lot smaller - reducing page load times for clients and data transfer for servers - if the CSS included by a library was solely the CSS used by one's site, and no more. This is why we web developers use an npm/vite build step generally, even if our out is very plain static HTML/CSS.

"Well why can't I just use Tailwind like I do with bootstrap? I just want to play around with it and not have to learn all that build stuff."

You can: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation/play-cdn

You'll also notice, if you search for Bootstrap today, that it expects one is using npm and webpack, parcel, or vite.

Also: When served from a CDN like your link above, popular CSS like Bootstrap had a decent chance of _already_ being in your browser's cache, so despite downloading more initially you'd come across sites using the same version that meant _no_ delay downloading CSS for it.