Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind. At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! it turns out Tailwind taught me a lot When I started thinking about structuring CSS, I was intimidated at first: I’m not very good at structuring my CSS! But then I started reading blog posts talking about how to structure CSS (like A whole cascade of layers or How I write CSS in 2024) and I realized a couple of things: Every CSS code base has a bunch of different things going on (layouts! fonts! colours! common components!) It’s extremely useful to have systems or guidelines to manage each of those things, otherwise things…