Tailwindcss: "grey" should be "gray"

[pedzed]

"grey" colors — or "colours" if you are British — should be "gray", because US English is the universally accepted language of the web. At the very least, there should be an alias in place that people can refer to gray.

I'm not American, but I find it unreasonable to have everything but Tailwind in US English.

[jasonlbeggs]

That's the beauty of Tailwind. Everything can be customized to whatever you want! If you want to change all the greys to gray, you can do that in your config file.

[dwightwatson]

I'd prefer to see Tailwind adopt the American spelling out of the box as well.

As a user of Australian English this has thrown me off a number of times already. I know it's an easy thing to customise, but I think consistency with other web-based tech using US English would be preferable.

[adamwathan]

Will probably change this at some point, I agree should go full 🇺🇸 .

[yordis]

I knew I wasn't crazy typing grey for some reason 🤣I never understood why I kept typing grey instead gray before but now I do ( I thought it was a misspelling 🙃)

[devcircus]

This wasn't on accident. I remember it actually being talked about somewhere before it was used. I've a started spelling it "grey" outside web development because of using it in tailwind.

[donnysim]

Well, there is a filter: grayscale(100%), not greyscale so I'm for the gray spelling :3

[pedzed]

What I notice is that those who give a thumbs down do not bother to clarify their reasoning.

The only thing I can think of is what I already mentioned implicitly: backwards compatibility. According to @jasonlbeggs this should not be a problem though: you can easily revert the spelling consistency fix by customizing it.

[GeoffSelby]

What about us Americans that have always spelled it as grey instead of gray? 🤣

[laurencei]

People who care about performance, size etc will be using PurgeCSS - so would it hurt to just have both?

Means its 100% backwards compatible, and we dont strain US/British relations any further...

(As an Aussie I'm happy either way)

[dwightwatson]

I don’t think it’s fine to assume that everyone will be using PurgeCSS, but the other issue with having both is that they might be used interchangeably by accident, duplicating the classes.

[adamwathan]

I ran this poll on Twitter but unfortunately can't guarantee that only Americans responded 😅

https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1045684872801484800

CSS actually defines both grey and gray variants:

I'm partial to "grey" personally but don't care that much, so I'm prepared to be convinced to change it in a future release. Not too worried about it breaking anything because most users will have their own Tailwind config file with the colors defined with the original spelling anyways, so nothing would actually break for them.

[laurencei]

I just had another thought;

We already do text-center - and "Center" is American English. Whereas "Centre" is British English.

So for consistency - it would seem logical for American English to be the standard if we are using that style elsewhere.

[nternetinspired]

I'm a Brit, but CSS is generally en-US (: center; : capitalize;, etc.), so I think there's a clear argument to changing to US English just to make Tailwind _closer to CSS_.

[caneco]

Just a random thought on this matter…

Why not add some option in the configuration for the spelling of choice?

javascript options: { prefix: '', important: false, separator: ':', english: 'american', // or 'british' },

[adamwathan]

I think it's simpler to just change the colors in your config file, that's the only thing that would be affected anyways 👍

[nfq]

I don't know, I think being dogmatic about this is bad. Consistency is good sure, but what character? I for one (being of British decent) always use British spelling in my docs, and usually American English for 'things' in code. But why be stubborn about it?

[hacknug]

This should be addressed in v1.0: https://github.com/tailwindcss/tailwindcss/commit/ebc2bc2b0cd87418d5344d7d6b92bdbee101bc37#comments

[adamwathan]

Switched this for 1.0 🇺🇸 My main motivation is that there's a new gray() function coming in CSS, so best to stick with the same spelling the platform uses.

[tehpsalmist]

'murica.