Tailwind CSS v1.5.0

Date
Author
Adam Wathan
@adamwathan

I was hoping to save v1.5.0 for something really exciting but we needed a new feature to support the new @tailwindcss/typography plugin so h*ck it, we’re dropping some new stuff on you early.

No breaking changes, this is a minor release and we’re professionals you silly goose.

New Features

Component variants support

Until Tailwind CSS v1.5.0, only “utility” classes were really intended to be used with variants (like “responsive”, “hover”, “focus”, etc.)

While these are still much more useful for utilities than any other type of class, we now support generating variants for component classes as well, like the prose classes in the new @tailwindcss/typography plugin:

<article class="prose md:prose-lg">
  <!-- Content -->
</article>

You can take advantage of this feature in your own component classes by using the new variants option in the second argument of the addComponents plugin API:

plugin(function ({ addComponents })) {
  addComponents({
    '.card': {
      // ...
    }
  }, {
    variants: ['responsive']
  })
})

…or using the array shorthand you might be familiar with from the addUtilities API:

plugin(function ({ addComponents })) {
  addComponents({
    '.card': {
      // ...
    }
  }, ['responsive'])
})

To take advantage of these feature in your custom CSS (rather than using the plugin API), you can use a new @layer directive to explicitly tell Tailwind that your styles belong to the “components” bucket:

@layer components {
  @responsive {
    .card {
      /* ... */
    }
  }
}

This helps Tailwind purge your unused CSS correctly, ensuring it doesn’t remove any responsive component variants when using the default “conservative” purge mode.

Responsive container variants

Piggy-backing off of the new component variants support, the container class now supports variants!

<!-- Only lock the width at `md` sizes and above -->
<div class="md:container">
  <!-- ... -->
</div>

We’ve enabled responsive variants by default, but if you are sick in the head you can also manually enable other variants like focus, group-hover, whatever:

tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  variants: {
    container: ['responsive', 'focus', 'group-hover'],
  },
}

New focus-visible variant

We’ve added support for the :focus-visible pseudo-class using a new focus-visible variant.

This is super useful for adding focus styles that only appear to keyboard users, and are ignored for mouse users:

<button class="focus-visible:outline-none focus-visible:shadow-outline ...">
  Click me
</button>

It’s not enabled for anything by default, but you can enable it in the variants section of your config file:

tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  variants: {
    backgroundColor: ['responsive', 'hover', 'focus', 'focus-visible'],
  },
}

Browser support is still pretty weak on this but getting better. In the mean time, check out the polyfill and corresponding PostCSS plugin if you’d like to use this in all browsers right away.

New checked variant

We’ve added a new checked variant you can use to conditionally style things like checkboxes and radio buttons:

<input type="checkbox" class="bg-white checked:bg-blue-500" />

It’s not enabled for anything by default, but you can enable it in the variants section of your config file:

tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  variants: {
    backgroundColor: ['responsive', 'hover', 'focus', 'checked'],
  },
}

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