Hello, A question to frontend developers. I am a beginner on frontend.
I am building a UI for my company to replace old legacy one with React and this question is about choosing how to apply design to it.
I have Tailwind CSS on one hand and Ant Design on the other (I didnt like mui and Bootstrap doesn't seem to have enterprise components as ant) As far as I understand, tailwind is great. It allows me to literally build an application without touching the css but I have to build my own react components with it. Ant design or mantine has ready to use components which I can use and rapidly build my application.
My question is, is it the right approach to: - Use a component framework for now and replace legacy app. - Introduce tailwind later when I have a frontend resource in hand and then build own component library
Thank you.
Although I use Hugo instead of React (and don't have experience with Ant Design), I'd highly suggest using Tailwind. The main reason I like it is because I can't tell if a site is using Tailwind or regular CSS, whereas once you've seen a Bootstrap site, you'll see Bootstrap everywhere whenever it's used (and I'd assume the same with Ant Design).
Most probably you don't want to create component's logic from scratch. As you already have an app, try to make a list of all components that you'll need - modals, dropdowns, etc. And then try to find a library that has all of them, because some components are rare (like a range selector).
There's some libraries built with/for tailwind, for example https://headlessui.com. It's pretty basic, but maybe it'll be enough for you.
It's not that when you're using tailwind you're not touching css. It's just a convenient way to write it and it gives you a nice design system by default.
