In the spirit of asking valuable questions, here is my view on balance:
- Does it increase the size of the html output? Yes.
- Can it potentially decrease the overall size of the CSS output? Yes
- Does it make the html output less semantic? Yes
- Can we still develop semantically? Yes, with Shells (added by Cwicly)
- Does it add a lot of classes to the inspector in Tailwind mode? Yes!
- Does it have some advantages for rapid development? Yes
I personally advocate for a semantic development approach for maintainability and reusability, which to some degree is the antithesis of the Tailwind approach.
As Cwicly has added Shells, even though we don’t get semantic html output, we can still develop semantically in the same way and receive all of the benefits of doing so with Tailwind.
On that basis, it can be seen as a reasonable compromise to benefit from the rapid development and consistent methodology opportunity that Tailwind provides.
This is obviously a per developer, per site choice and we have chosen to use it in our new development projects.
The one thing I personally would like to see solved, to improve the usability of Tailwind mode is to have a slightly different way of presenting the Tailwind classes at the top of the inspector panel, as they can potentially take up a lot of space, the more styles you change. I could have sworn @Marius already posted something about this but upon searching can’t find it, so I may raise a feature request about it.