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Wait Bootstrap is only 10 years old? I'd have sworn it was 15 years old or so by now. I created Picnic CSS back in 2014 as an alternative to the big and well-es

Wait Bootstrap is only 10 years old? I'd have sworn it was 15 years old or so by now. I created Picnic CSS back in 2014 as an alternative to the big and well-established Bootstrap project, if Bootstrap was created in 2011 it means that it became the main front-end project everyone was using in just under 3 years! That's amazing, and congrats on the 10th anniversary!

alpha_squared 5y ago
The front-end web realm was really eager for some sort of standardized way of doing things. Every project prior to Bootstrap required revisiting styles and starting from scratch or creating an internal Bootstrap-like base that would be used, which meant very little of that would be carried between jobs for employees. This is also probably why the early days of Angular and React were so unstable; mass adoption through different versions which were still finding a stable approach to iterative evolution.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  Your comment is spot on. Prior to Bootstrap, the concept of a purely CSS framework was relatively foreign. Aside from jQuery UI (which of course required jQuery and had limitations on styling) the closest thing we had in the 2009-2011 period was reset.css and 960.gs. Even rudimentary things like rounded buttons were still impacted by the lack of uniform border-radius support plus an IE6/IE7 marketshare greater than 30%.
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah the horror show that is learning every rando dev's personal CSS methods could be really painful. When you just want to move a button ... "oh they're using bootstrap" often saved a ton of time, for things that really shouldn't take time.
- testudovictoria 5y ago
  > Every project prior to Bootstrap required revisiting styles and starting from scratch or creating an internal Bootstrap-like base that would be used I went through several projects where team leads laughed at the idea of Bootstrap in their projects. They treated Bootstrap as a bulky, unnecessary mess of a framework that only inexperienced code monkeys used in spite of it being small and modular. The dumbest one of all was a team lead who turned out to have little to no real world experience in decision making. He had some help creating an internal CSS framework. It was responsive, modular, mobile first, and had lots of builtin classes for font/element sizes, colors, behavior, etc. Sound familiar? His column-based framework was a terrible drop in for Bootstrap. Even the class attributes were blatant rip-offs, but the lack of robustness meant lots of inline CSS to fix elements.
- brundolf 5y ago
  The Angular/React model also threw a huge wrench into the Bootstrap way of doing things. The latter relied on a smattering of ad-hoc JS for things like modals and tooltips. It dovetailed nicely with jQuery, but I remember it was wholly incompatible with Angular. There ended up being an "Angular Bootstrap" package specifically designed for that, and I remember it felt like a regression at the time that everything would get siloed under these JS frameworks.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Yeah, it got popular quick. I think the bar was low for good design on the web, and they did a really good of making it out of the box seem like "good design". I remember the first time I saw an open source thing was bootstrap based, without knowing what bootstrap was, I immediately asked "wait, what did you use to make it look that good, and how can I use it?" I could guess it was using some third party tool, it was just so much better than typical.
antidaily 5y ago
Maybe you're thinking of Blueprint, which is about 15 years old now.

alpha_squared 5y ago

The front-end web realm was really eager for some sort of standardized way of doing things. Every project prior to Bootstrap required revisiting styles and starting from scratch or creating an internal Bootstrap-like base that would be used, which meant very little of that would be carried between jobs for employees. This is also probably why the early days of Angular and React were so unstable; mass adoption through different versions which were still finding a stable approach to iterative evolution.

ianhawes 5y ago
Your comment is spot on. Prior to Bootstrap, the concept of a purely CSS framework was relatively foreign. Aside from jQuery UI (which of course required jQuery and had limitations on styling) the closest thing we had in the 2009-2011 period was reset.css and 960.gs. Even rudimentary things like rounded buttons were still impacted by the lack of uniform border-radius support plus an IE6/IE7 marketshare greater than 30%.
duxup 5y ago
Yeah the horror show that is learning every rando dev's personal CSS methods could be really painful. When you just want to move a button ... "oh they're using bootstrap" often saved a ton of time, for things that really shouldn't take time.
testudovictoria 5y ago
> Every project prior to Bootstrap required revisiting styles and starting from scratch or creating an internal Bootstrap-like base that would be used I went through several projects where team leads laughed at the idea of Bootstrap in their projects. They treated Bootstrap as a bulky, unnecessary mess of a framework that only inexperienced code monkeys used in spite of it being small and modular. The dumbest one of all was a team lead who turned out to have little to no real world experience in decision making. He had some help creating an internal CSS framework. It was responsive, modular, mobile first, and had lots of builtin classes for font/element sizes, colors, behavior, etc. Sound familiar? His column-based framework was a terrible drop in for Bootstrap. Even the class attributes were blatant rip-offs, but the lack of robustness meant lots of inline CSS to fix elements.
brundolf 5y ago
The Angular/React model also threw a huge wrench into the Bootstrap way of doing things. The latter relied on a smattering of ad-hoc JS for things like modals and tooltips. It dovetailed nicely with jQuery, but I remember it was wholly incompatible with Angular. There ended up being an "Angular Bootstrap" package specifically designed for that, and I remember it felt like a regression at the time that everything would get siloed under these JS frameworks.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Yeah, it got popular quick. I think the bar was low for good design on the web, and they did a really good of making it out of the box seem like "good design". I remember the first time I saw an open source thing was bootstrap based, without knowing what bootstrap was, I immediately asked "wait, what did you use to make it look that good, and how can I use it?" I could guess it was using some third party tool, it was just so much better than typical.

antidaily 5y ago

Maybe you're thinking of Blueprint, which is about 15 years old now.