What is Tailwind CSS? Unlock Your Design Potential with Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is basically a utility-first CSS framework for quickly building custom user interfaces. It’s a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that provides you with all the constructing blocks it’s essential to construct bespoke designs without any annoying opinionated kinds you have to battle to override.

The beauty of this factor known as tailwind is it doesn’t impose design specs or how your website ought to look, you merely carry tiny components collectively to assemble a personal interface that’s distinctive. What Tailwind merely does is take an ‘uncooked’ CSS file, process this CSS file over a configuration file, and produce an output.

Why Tailwind CSS?

Now you might be questioning why use Tailwind over different CSS frameworks? Tailwind CSS is a low-level framework. Meaning, unlike different CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Materialize, Tailwind doesn’t offer totally styled components like buttons, dropdowns, and navbars. As a substitute, it gives utility classes so you’ll be able to create your own reusable components.

For that purpose, it gives much more flexibility and control over what your software appears like than different CSS frameworks. This will allow you to create a extra unique site.

Advantages of Tailwind CSS

No more silly names for CSS classes and Id’s.
Minimum lines of Code in CSS file.
We can customize the designs to make the components.
Makes the website responsive.
Makes the changes in the desired manner.
CSS is global in nature and if make changes in the file the property is changed in all the HTML files linked to it. But with the help of Tailwind CSS we can use utility classes and make local changes.

Also Read: Create Login Form With Username, Password or Fingerprint in Flutter

Installation process of Tailwind CSS

There are two ways to use the CSS we can install them on our server or we can use the CDN link as well.

Method 1: Install Tailwind via npm

Step 1:

npm init -y

Step 2:

npm install tailwindcss

Step 3:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Step 4: It is an optional step

npx tailwindcss init

Step 5: This command is used to compile style.css is the file that has to be compiled and output.css is the file on which it has to be compiled. If the file output.css is not created earlier then it will automatically be created.

npx tailwindcss build styles.css -o output.css

Method 2: Using Tailwind via CDN

<link href="https://unpkg.com/tailwindcss@^1.0/dist/tailwind.min.css"rel="stylesheet">

Some limitations when CDN is used these are:

Customize Tailwind’s default theme can’t be used
Directives like @apply, @variants, etc can’t be used
Can’t install third-party plugins

Example of Navbar using Tailwind CSS

The navbar element can be used to point out a list of navigation links positioned on the top aspect of your web page based on multiple layouts, sizes, and dropdowns.

<nav class="px-2 bg-white border-gray-200 dark:bg-gray-900 dark:border-gray-700">
  <div class="container flex flex-wrap items-center justify-between mx-auto">
    <a href="#" class="flex items-center">
        <img src="https://techzpad.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/techpad-logo-e1659162093306.png" class="h-6 mr-3 sm:h-10" alt="Flowbite Logo" />
        <span class="self-center text-xl font-semibold whitespace-nowrap dark:text-white">TechzPad</span>
    </a>
    <button data-collapse-toggle="navbar-dropdown" type="button" class="inline-flex items-center p-2 ml-3 text-sm text-gray-500 rounded-lg md:hidden hover:bg-gray-100 focus:outline-none focus:ring-2 focus:ring-gray-200 dark:text-gray-400 dark:hover:bg-gray-700 dark:focus:ring-gray-600" aria-controls="navbar-dropdown" aria-expanded="false">
      <span class="sr-only">Open main menu</span>
      <svg class="w-6 h-6" aria-hidden="true" fill="currentColor" viewBox="0 0 20 20" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path fill-rule="evenodd" d="M3 5a1 1 0 011-1h12a1 1 0 110 2H4a1 1 0 01-1-1zM3 10a1 1 0 011-1h12a1 1 0 110 2H4a1 1 0 01-1-1zM3 15a1 1 0 011-1h12a1 1 0 110 2H4a1 1 0 01-1-1z" clip-rule="evenodd"></path></svg>
    </button>
    <div class="hidden w-full md:block md:w-auto" id="navbar-dropdown">
      <ul class="flex flex-col p-4 mt-4 border border-gray-100 rounded-lg bg-gray-50 md:flex-row md:space-x-8 md:mt-0 md:text-sm md:font-medium md:border-0 md:bg-white dark:bg-gray-800 md:dark:bg-gray-900 dark:border-gray-700">
        <li>
          <a href="#" class="block py-2 pl-3 pr-4 text-white bg-blue-700 rounded md:bg-transparent md:text-blue-700 md:p-0 md:dark:text-white dark:bg-blue-600 md:dark:bg-transparent" aria-current="page">Home</a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <button id="dropdownNavbarLink" data-dropdown-toggle="dropdownNavbar" class="flex items-center justify-between w-full py-2 pl-3 pr-4 font-medium text-gray-700 rounded hover:bg-gray-100 md:hover:bg-transparent md:border-0 md:hover:text-blue-700 md:p-0 md:w-auto dark:text-gray-400 dark:hover:text-white dark:focus:text-white dark:border-gray-700 dark:hover:bg-gray-700 md:dark:hover:bg-transparent">Dropdown <svg class="w-5 h-5 ml-1" aria-hidden="true" fill="currentColor" viewBox="0 0 20 20" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path fill-rule="evenodd" d="M5.293 7.293a1 1 0 011.414 0L10 10.586l3.293-3.293a1 1 0 111.414 1.414l-4 4a1 1 0 01-1.414 0l-4-4a1 1 0 010-1.414z" clip-rule="evenodd"></path></svg></button>
            <!-- Dropdown menu -->
            <div id="dropdownNavbar" class="z-10 hidden font-normal bg-white divide-y divide-gray-100 rounded-lg shadow w-44 dark:bg-gray-700 dark:divide-gray-600">
                <ul class="py-2 text-sm text-gray-700 dark:text-gray-400" aria-labelledby="dropdownLargeButton">
                  <li>
                    <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 hover:bg-gray-100 dark:hover:bg-gray-600 dark:hover:text-white">Dashboard</a>
                  </li>
                  <li>
                    <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 hover:bg-gray-100 dark:hover:bg-gray-600 dark:hover:text-white">Settings</a>
                  </li>
                  <li>
                    <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 hover:bg-gray-100 dark:hover:bg-gray-600 dark:hover:text-white">Earnings</a>
                  </li>
                </ul>
                <div class="py-1">
                  <a href="#" class="block px-4 py-2 text-sm text-gray-700 hover:bg-gray-100 dark:hover:bg-gray-600 dark:text-gray-400 dark:hover:text-white">Sign out</a>
                </div>
            </div>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" class="block py-2 pl-3 pr-4 text-gray-700 rounded hover:bg-gray-100 md:hover:bg-transparent md:border-0 md:hover:text-blue-700 md:p-0 dark:text-gray-400 md:dark:hover:text-white dark:hover:bg-gray-700 dark:hover:text-white md:dark:hover:bg-transparent">Services</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" class="block py-2 pl-3 pr-4 text-gray-700 rounded hover:bg-gray-100 md:hover:bg-transparent md:border-0 md:hover:text-blue-700 md:p-0 dark:text-gray-400 md:dark:hover:text-white dark:hover:bg-gray-700 dark:hover:text-white md:dark:hover:bg-transparent">Pricing</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" class="block py-2 pl-3 pr-4 text-gray-700 rounded hover:bg-gray-100 md:hover:bg-transparent md:border-0 md:hover:text-blue-700 md:p-0 dark:text-gray-400 md:dark:hover:text-white dark:hover:bg-gray-700 dark:hover:text-white md:dark:hover:bg-transparent">Contact</a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  </div>
</nav>

Output