Damien Riehl is a technology lawyer and musician. And he doesn’t agree with copyright infringement lawsuits, for him music is mathematics. And if you remember that there are only 8 musical notes, Damien had the brilliant idea of making an algorithm that made all the combinations and put it in the public domain. According to him, this can help in those cases where someone is prosecuted just because they used a combination used by another, and the second person didn’t even know. See the faq at http://allthemusic.info/ to understand better.

I’m not a lawyer, nor am I defending piracy, what caught my attention was the idea of noting that there is a finite space of possibilities. I think there is a fascination in being able to say ‘here’s everything about topic X’, personally that’s what attracted me to the master’s degree. I won’t be arrogant and say that I know everything about Design Thinking but I approached my studies with this objective.

Another topic: Think about the design of an HTML or SPA page, how many different ways are there to do it? We use CSS to control what is displayed. The colors are finite, ranging from #000000 to #FFFFFF; borders are top-bottom-left-right; and so on. Adam Wathan noticed this and developed TailwindCSS. With TailWind, you can write your CSS without leaving your HTML page. See the difference, before, if I wanted my text to be blue and bold, I would do this:

style.css

.info{
color: blue;
font-weight: bold;
}

index.html

<p class="info>
  Lorem Ipsum
</p>

And voilà, bold blue text. TailWindCSS allows you to write directly and it has a library with hundreds and hundreds of possibilities. As soon as you use it in your html, it automatically generates the CSS. This is a detail, an application runs in your terminal and scans your pages to know what to generate:

index.html

<p class="text-blue font-bold">
  Lorem Ipsum
</p>

or very large, bold, underlined, sky blue text centered on the page:

<p class="text-3xl font-bold underline text-sky-400 text-center">
  Lorem Ipsum
</p>

UnoCSS takes the idea further and eliminates the css file completely. In UnoCSS there is a script that analyses your pages at runtime and generates classes for you. And there is no need for an application running in the background. Magic! Note that the way of writing is exactly the same as TailWindCSS.

index.html

<p class="text-blue font-bold">
  Lorem Ipsum
</p>

I’ve been using UnoCSS a lot. But I have my criticisms, the large number of classes can make HTML code verbose, and it’s a fact, your HTML is difficult to understand. And the CSS generated by TailWindCSS is only readable by… TailWind developers 😀.

Additionally, the framework’s reliance on utility classes can lead to a lack of consistency in design across the site, as different people may use different classes to achieve similar effects. And since there is no CSS file maintained by the team, the need to document style choices is essential.

Still, the practicality seems to me to show that frameworks like these will be increasingly popular.