A few days ago I decided to strip my blog's code down to the bare minimum. I deleted every line of CSS and left only this:
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;
That felt like true minimalism. Look, not a single line of CSS written by me. I convinced myself that all the CSS I had written before was unnecessary and that Tailwind could handle everything. From then on I deliberately avoided plain CSS. I wanted a minimal life, a minimal blog, minimal CSS.
Then one moment I realized I had been locked up. The prison was a place where CSS was forbidden; every problem had to be solved with Tailwind class names.
I found a button I liked
At the bottom of my homepage there is a button titled “All Posts”; when clicked it goes to the archive. Before, I had just used a text link, but I worried people might miss it or see it and feel no urge to click. So I wanted to make it look better. I tried many Tailwind-based button styles and none felt right.
Then I remembered something in my bookmarks: a button style written in plain CSS. It was cool and fit exactly what I needed. But I had said I was going minimalist. No more CSS in the blog.
The minimalism trap
I already knew the trap of minimalism: minimalism for its own sake, which just creates a new kind of anxiety. Still, without noticing, I had walked into a prison of fake minimalism taken to an extreme. So to hell with that kind of minimalism. I don't need the anxiety or the restriction.
I copied the style I liked into my globals.css file.