Inspired Again by Julia Evans

In August 2019 I discovered Tailwind, the CSS framework that makes responsive design relatively easy, thanks to an enthusiastic post by Julia Evans. I immediately adopted it to redesign this site. Over time, however, I found it harder and harder to maintain the styling of the site, and not only because of the occasional clash with microformats. It was just messy.

At the end of February 2024 I started an effort to redo the underlying CSS, this time trusting more in the browser, as taught by Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell in Every Layout, which I was very happy to buy. It took a long time, but nine months later, the new improved CSS was (mostly) ready and honestly, nothing much visible changed.1

Anyway, a couple of days ago I discovered that Julia Evans was Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS. Rather than being a clever-clogs and claiming I was somehow ahead of the game, which I never am, I aim to be inspired again by that article.

Components, Julia Evans explains, are the way she organises the bulk of her styles, and that her next step is to develop “conventions to maintain some consistency across the site and keep these components in line with each other!” That seems like an idea well worth copying.

I also very much like the idea of having a specific colours.css file in which I can define the values for named colours on the site and then use the names more rigorously. I'm thinking maybe separate stylesheets for root and native tags, one for colours, and one for my defined component classes. Will that be inefficient? I need to find out.

Once again, I don’t expect the look of the place to change, only to make it easier to keep things looking good.

1. Though there are still plenty of little things that annoy me and that I need to deal with. ↩