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> Are people really creating websites that are expected to live for less than three years? Or are people working on longer-term products and expecting to do a m

> Are people really creating websites that are expected to live for less than three years? Or are people working on longer-term products and expecting to do a major rewrite every few years? "Yes". I imagine it's a bit of both. Would shops doing client work worry about the long term maintenance about the work they are doing? Using Bootstrap, knowing it will be end of life in 1-2 years is probably in their favour. They get to use a shiny new framework to impress the client and can sign a rewrite/tech debt contract in 4-6 years! My personal experience with Bootstrap is that the upgrade story is fairly reasonable and we also have software on Bootstrap 2 still running just fine. It was the style of the time and the app shows it, but there's been no need to rewrite that portion.

hw 6y ago
> My personal experience with Bootstrap is that the upgrade story is fairly reasonable and we also have software on Bootstrap 2 still running just fine. It was the style of the time and the app shows it, but there's been no need to rewrite that portion. Same here. Our app has been on 2.3.2 for the longest time. Just not a high priority to update it at the moment, and not to mention it's just a giant effort.
- mdo 6y ago
  Very happy to hear this for both of you! Bootstrap 2 was life changing for us to create and share :). <3
- freehunter 6y ago
  Other than not getting newer features, are there any reasons you'd need to upgrade? Are there security concerns? I guess maybe some XSS with some of the JQuery stuff but that should be easily mitigated. Seems like a CSS framework is the least likely to need constant patching.
duncanawoods 6y ago
> fairly reasonable I can't say I agree. I had a miserable time going from 3 to 4 because it also dropped Less support. Most of the blame goes to css but I do not welcome churn on a library like this. With a strongly typed API, most of the breaking changes cause errors so you can just go through and fix them. With code then you can also cover behaviour regressions with unit tests. With css / bootstrap, you get zero errors, just a broken visual layout. You get a lengthy migration guide https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/migration/ https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/migration/ that you have to manually go through line by line, searching the codebase for each affected feature. The affected features are not single css classes but how multiple different css classes interact in hierarchies with changing requirements on the DOM structure. Fixes don't just mean updating the css but changing the DOM too. So much for css separating appearance from content. Some of the breaking changes are things like changing fundamental default sizes of things like fonts or media-queries which for a given site are not things you can change willy nilly so if you need to preserve the existing appearance you now need to rewrite very basic things and decide how much pain you going to through by fighting Bootstrap's changed defaults. You only know you are actually done by looking at the appearance of every part of the site, on all the relevant devices, in all the relevant conditions so that each media query triggers. Ugh, it's a nightmare.

hw 6y ago

> My personal experience with Bootstrap is that the upgrade story is fairly reasonable and we also have software on Bootstrap 2 still running just fine. It was the style of the time and the app shows it, but there's been no need to rewrite that portion. Same here. Our app has been on 2.3.2 for the longest time. Just not a high priority to update it at the moment, and not to mention it's just a giant effort.

mdo 6y ago
Very happy to hear this for both of you! Bootstrap 2 was life changing for us to create and share :). <3
freehunter 6y ago
Other than not getting newer features, are there any reasons you'd need to upgrade? Are there security concerns? I guess maybe some XSS with some of the JQuery stuff but that should be easily mitigated. Seems like a CSS framework is the least likely to need constant patching.

duncanawoods 6y ago

> fairly reasonable I can't say I agree. I had a miserable time going from 3 to 4 because it also dropped Less support. Most of the blame goes to css but I do not welcome churn on a library like this. With a strongly typed API, most of the breaking changes cause errors so you can just go through and fix them. With code then you can also cover behaviour regressions with unit tests. With css / bootstrap, you get zero errors, just a broken visual layout. You get a lengthy migration guide https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/migration/ https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/migration/ that you have to manually go through line by line, searching the codebase for each affected feature. The affected features are not single css classes but how multiple different css classes interact in hierarchies with changing requirements on the DOM structure. Fixes don't just mean updating the css but changing the DOM too. So much for css separating appearance from content. Some of the breaking changes are things like changing fundamental default sizes of things like fonts or media-queries which for a given site are not things you can change willy nilly so if you need to preserve the existing appearance you now need to rewrite very basic things and decide how much pain you going to through by fighting Bootstrap's changed defaults. You only know you are actually done by looking at the appearance of every part of the site, on all the relevant devices, in all the relevant conditions so that each media query triggers. Ugh, it's a nightmare.