Slightly OT: Is it just me or is Bootstrap a bit of an overkill nowadays? I know you can import what you need and keep the lib size small but the overall framework feels aged and many feature are no rocket-science anymore. Still some features are handy but again, is it worth it?
Without any customization you have this typical thousands times seen Bootstrap look. Only few of the available Bootstrap themes have an original and from Bootstrap outstanding look but then you add even more bloat to your site figuring out what CSS you could leave out. You could also customize yourself but again why not quickly do the stuff without Bootstrap? FE development got quite far these days and today's CSS and JS is not your daddy's HTML anymore, Flexbox is great and there're tons of specialized and modular libs.
Besides, Sass and Less were never my favorites but this would be a minor pick. They are ok to get along.
Last but not least they claim to be mobile-first which is IMO far off and the biggest deal breaker. Just open the Bootstrap page on a newer iPhone (eg 6) and open the menu. There's some significant lag until the menu opens and then the menu-open animation sluggishly stutters running at very low framerate. This could have be done with native CSS and hardware-accelerated 3d-transforms in a responsive and butter-smooth manner with a just few lines. Just having a responsive grid-system doesn't make Bootstrap mobile-first.
I believe that Bootstrap could be good for non consumer facing sites where the audience is less demanding. Eg you need to build an internal reporting dashboard for some company departments and it doesn't have to slick, smooth or sexy. Just a dashboard which is faster and more flexible than sending Excel sheets back and forth. Then yes, Bootstrap is a good choice.
Don't want to be too negative, maybe it's just my cluenessless but could somebody enlighten me: why do I need else Bootstrap in 2016?
> Slightly OT: Is it just me or is Bootstrap a bit of an overkill nowadays?
Coming from someone whose PHP skills aren't too shabby but his graphical design skills stink, I'd say no.
From the very beginning of my current project, I've had difficulty finding a partner with strong UI skills. In fact, I chose my early frameworks almost solely upon needing to rely on the UI design of others. UI just isn't a strength. Hell, I don't even match clothes well and (I kid you not) I still keep a note in my phone about which colors of shirts and pants match together.
Although Bootstrap is fat, as you suggest, for someone like me having to do almost all UI on my own and who's been told his logo looks like it was done by a toddler with a large paintbrush, it is wonderful to be able to drop Bootstrap in so I can focus my attention elsewhere. A tool like Pingendo makes it even easier for me.
Identify with this completely. I've done a lot of web programming over the years with PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails and now some Go. I'm perfectly comfortable with Javascript and CSS in terms of making adjustments...
But if you ask me to build an interface from scratch with bootstrap I'm going to end up curled up in a ball on the floor.
Bootstrap is not overkill due to the inclusion of mobile layouts alone. Reimplementing them from scratch in CSS and making sure the website still works 100% without elements breaking out of the CSS containers is difficult and a task many startups fail at.
I agree. Ask clients why they really want Bootstrap and it comes down border-radius on buttons and that blue background color.
It's definitely not a better way to create fluid-responsive viewports.
And the whole grid obsession has gone too far. Among graphic designers and studio artists, a "grid" was always just a fun-to-try curiosity for noob artists to learn composition. Grids are only seriously used by "op" (optical illusion) artists and a few OCD artists with an unhealthy obsession with geometric alignment, like maybe Edward Hopper.
Your ideas that grids and therefore alignment is some quirk among a few OCD artists is quite wrong. Good designers break grid all the time, but they all use grids and guides to some extent. Not using a grid is the sure sign of an amateur. Just because a grid is a well-known concept to everyone doesn't make it amateurish.
I have a BFA in this subject and 30+ years of experience designing graphics and interfaces back to Deluxe Paint and Photoshop 1. So I can't take an anon post seriously. What your saying demonstrates my point, it's a self-reinforcing trend that's gaining more traction, and I blame the popularity of Twitter for that. It was not common to see so many CSS grids until Twitter Bootstrap.
The problem is, non-designers are buying and selling these frameworks and themes. Often designers aren't even part of the purchase process. And how many designers would object: "You're making a mistake because you will regret the technical debt of this." Hey, more billable hours for everybody when it comes time to maintain the grid within the grid from hell, which was FUBAR code from day 1, further obfuscated by some proprietary WYSIWYG. Wow, the screenshot looks great though! How many designers even use the Bootstrap grid properly, assuming it was a good idea in the first place?
The fundamentals of composition haven't changed in hundreds of years. This is false: "Not using a grid is the sure sign of an amateur." Yes, grids go back to the Renaissance, but it's more often a crutch for a new artist copying a master, or for an OCD personality like Edward Hopper. You can feel the cold, painful rigidity of his work, it's amazing--but if the guy was my personal friend, I'd say he needs to loosen up and take off the training wheels. But hey, that's just my opinion ;-)
If you're going to use a grid, it's typically a starting point, when you're looking at a blank canvas, blank screen, blank piece of paper. And as your work takes shape, you no longer need the grid. The finished work may still have some pleasing hints of underlying structure, even though the grid has been taken away. You may want to shift things just above or just below alignment to create a little interesting tension, which you can see in Cezanne's work. But usually the grid is completely gone by the time you're done. Most of the time, it's not there to "rule" the composition from start to finish. The grid is typically a reference point.
Anyway, my real complaint about grids is all the technical debt it adds, and in the case of Bootstrap it's bad, in my opinion. And it's totally unnecessary. If you want two columns, just work from 50%, you don't need a complex system for that. It's harder to make changes when there's a cryptic grid system in place. When I see code like class="grid-12c" next to class="grid-9b" I'm thinking what the hell? Is that supposed to be human-readable? To me, it seems like a bad trend. If people want grids so bad, then why did we stop using tables 15 years ago? Seriously. I thought floated divs were a step in the right direction, more akin to how designers/artists work, like I can just imagine Matisse saying, "Float that margin a little lower. Perfect!"
> If you want two columns, just work from 50%, you don't need a complex system for that.
That's what you'd think, but intuitive CSS working differently, or not at all, depending on your browser is what made Bootstrap necessary in the first place.
Bootstrap's great feature is that it works at all. I assure you that rolling your own site with a level of functionality provided by Bootstrap is a massive pain in the ass.
Tables were a pain in their own way. Don't you remember "font" tags?
I build WP themes for agencies. They often specify bootstrap or foundation as a starting point.
This makes more sense in a context where they are dealing with a lot of freelancers and don't want to deal with 25 idiosyncratic ways to implement a dropdown menu.
I specify bootstrap or whatever as a starting point because it's important to me to have a "toolbox" of stuff to pull from. Even after the themer's work is done, I need a set of UI elements to design with as my project's design evolves. A really good example of HTML/CSS toolboxes are a bunch of the themes at wrapbootstrap.com. Here's an example one I like:
For a programmer I have a pretty good graphic design sense, so I can limp along and build my own components while keeping an overall consistent style. A lot of other programmers are awful at this and I've seen some hideous stuff. Rando freelances are the extreme case, but even if you're stuck having a programmer without UI horse sense do UI work, having a framework based UI toolkit is a huge help.
bootstrap is great for when you want to build something, you know a lot of people know it already and you don't really want to go through the process of creating your own CSS. I mean think of all the java and .net teams that don't have a dedicated resource for UI and how much they can accomplish with it just going by the docs. If they didn't use bootstrap, there's hardly another framework that matches that gives you all of the components so that you're not distracted from the real meat and potatoes of the web app with making your own modals behave. It's certainly not perfect, but it's damn reliable and as good a standard as I've seen.
I don't think you should focus too much on that. Indeed, there is a "frontpage express" part, in it, but the app is still super useful should you remove that.
I've been prototyping a lot last year, and it was never straightforward because I have to compose with provided elements to build something looking a minimum like what I wanted.
Pingendo will allow me to do just that: quickly add, remove, switch components the fastest possible, and just focus on the product. This is the most important thing when wireframing.
Without any customization you have this typical thousands times seen Bootstrap look. Only few of the available Bootstrap themes have an original and from Bootstrap outstanding look but then you add even more bloat to your site figuring out what CSS you could leave out. You could also customize yourself but again why not quickly do the stuff without Bootstrap? FE development got quite far these days and today's CSS and JS is not your daddy's HTML anymore, Flexbox is great and there're tons of specialized and modular libs.
Besides, Sass and Less were never my favorites but this would be a minor pick. They are ok to get along.
Last but not least they claim to be mobile-first which is IMO far off and the biggest deal breaker. Just open the Bootstrap page on a newer iPhone (eg 6) and open the menu. There's some significant lag until the menu opens and then the menu-open animation sluggishly stutters running at very low framerate. This could have be done with native CSS and hardware-accelerated 3d-transforms in a responsive and butter-smooth manner with a just few lines. Just having a responsive grid-system doesn't make Bootstrap mobile-first.
I believe that Bootstrap could be good for non consumer facing sites where the audience is less demanding. Eg you need to build an internal reporting dashboard for some company departments and it doesn't have to slick, smooth or sexy. Just a dashboard which is faster and more flexible than sending Excel sheets back and forth. Then yes, Bootstrap is a good choice.
Don't want to be too negative, maybe it's just my cluenessless but could somebody enlighten me: why do I need else Bootstrap in 2016?