What's the difference between outline and ring in tailwind

Question

Tailwindcss supports both outline utility and ring. While I understand that ring is implemented using shadows, I'm not sure what's the use case to use each of them.

Do you have an example when to use what and why? Is one of them more suitable for focus styles? Why?

Answer 1

Both of these answers here are not quite correct.

You can change the width, color, offset, and opacity using both ring and outline. The difference between the two is that ring uses the CSS box-shadow property, and outline uses the CSS outline property.

In the past, the main reason people preferred box-shadow was because outline wouldn't honor an element's border radius, but now it does.

Box shadow does offer more customization, but it is specifically via blur and the ability to support multiple colors -- not width, opacity, or a single color like the other answers suggest.

For most use cases, it doesn't matter which one you choose.