Friends at Last: Tailwind & CSS…whodathunkit?!

Ever since the momentous release of Tailwind CSS version 4 at the start of this year (January 2025), I have been telling people that the CSS Framework Wars™ are finally over. CSS won! And amazingly, so did Tailwind. Plot twist!

Tailwind 4 may look familiar to those who are familiar with Tailwind, but it’s actually a ground-up rewrite that feels like it was developed by CSS fans, for CSS fans . Gone are the days of configuring the CSS framework with (*checks notes*) JavaScript, and using design tokens which simply don’t exist in vanilla CSS as real CSS variables.

If you had polled a bunch of people who didn’t like Tailwind before ( me! me! ooo pick me! ) and asked them how to “fix” Tailwind; then swirled the responses in a jar, pulled most of them out, and then made those fixes , that’s essentially what we got in version 4. 🤯

That’s a pretty big swing, and one I simply couldn’t be more thrilled with. And to demonstrate just how excited I am, I created a demo!