DaisyUI Pt 1: Taming CSS with TailwindCSS

Building good websites boils down to making things work and making things look pretty. That latter effort can take the most time to accomplish. It might be fun to dive deeply into CSS, but we need discipline or a good design system to ensure it stays consistent, flexible, and maintainable.

Theming

When developing the Compendium Theme for this site, I decided to work on building a solid design system around Tailwind to handle style. There are many people who love it, and some who hate it. Part of the challenge folks have is the reduced markup readability as project size and complexity scales.

After getting used to the declarative approach, I found it to be rather enjoyable to use. The theme has been flexible, and I would argue that the outcome looks very pretty. That said, there is room for improvement.

Component Classes

To take things to the next level, I am looking into daisyUI Tailwind CSS component classes which allows for writing cleaner HTML. The components it provides are CSS only, so there is no extra Javascript to ship. Additionally, it includes many themes out of the box, supports custom themes, and aligns nicely with my design system.

Let's start an agile refactor project to enhance my theme!