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Developers are an interesting bunch "Why does anyone use Bootstrap anymore?" and then goes and creates basically the exact same components again by hand. Seems

Developers are an interesting bunch "Why does anyone use Bootstrap anymore?" and then goes and creates basically the exact same components again by hand. Seems like that same trend repeats every couple of years "[Popular library] is now outdated, let me just create an in-house clone or move to identical but trendy [Popular library]." To be clear I very much like the USWDS components, but they are mostly 1:1 with Bootstrap while being incompatible, and having to maintain them in-house. Just feels like NIH. Am I missing something?

hallway_monitor 5y ago
Didn't you mean designers? In my experience, that's who loves pushing low-value efforts like this (yes, at the scale of the US government, Google etc it may be warranted). The real problem is you have too many designers on staff and they have found something to keep themselves busy.
- brimble 5y ago
  In my experience, PMs and middle managers drive a fair amount of unnecessary design work. Looks better in a PowerPoint than most things do, I reckon.
- jonshariat 5y ago
  (full disclosure: I am a designer) While I agree with you in general, I think the US gov has an excuse while others may not: they have much stricter laws and requirements they HAVE to meet.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
I would find real peace of mind in a design system maintained by a government that guarantees compliance with that government's accessibility requirements.
- gunsch 5y ago
  This one's the real answer (or at least a substantial part of it). On VA.gov, the USWDS components (and their composition into a modular forms system) was a large part of making sure that applications met the accessibility needs of the general public. Source: I was the VA.gov engineering lead for awhile
- sakopov 5y ago
  Any kind of technical compliance by government is guaranteed to be old and obsolete in the near future. The reality of the situation is that this "design system" is a waste of time and it will never iterate as fast as other systems maintained by industry experts in web compliance and accessibility. This is just a case where folks are happy that our government isn't doing shit in Dreamweaver anymore and has moved on to something that resembles progress. However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Considering that accessibility standards worldwide are mostly pushed forward by governments, even when there's action outside of it it's usually due to "government put laws stating specific requirements". While accessibility is usually afterthought unless directly whacked by a fine, and you can't just use "what's already available". As for streamlining - this is streamlining, making it so that multiple entities within government that all need to build websites can use a common shared resource instead of duplicating the work (even "going shopping" for external solution takes valuable time).
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > Any kind of technical compliance by government is guaranteed to be old and obsolete in the near future. The reality of the situation is that this "design system" is a waste of time and it will never iterate as fast as other systems maintained by industry experts in web compliance and accessibility. You really ought to check out how fast this design system has iterated to date: https://github.com/uswds/uswds/releases https://github.com/uswds/uswds/releases > However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available. First, I'm not sure why you think accessibility doesn't fall under streamlining government operations. Second, the folks at USDS are top professionals from industry and are limited to a four year "tour of duty", so they aren't lifelong government employees.
clairity 5y ago
bootstrap is a common design system base for companies that can't afford nor needs a full design team. it's a one-size-fits-none approach, but it's close enough that devs can wrangle it into shape well enough. larger entities with multiple, decoupled teams often move toward developing their own living design systems as bootstrap no longer fits the many idiosyncracies of the organization. i'm really looking forward to design systems that no longer rely on set breakpoints/grids and move to fully flexible, responsive layouts and components (come on, container queries!).
wanda 5y ago
Nope, you're not missing anything really, but I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3. I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use. In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda. Front-end isn't that difficult for websites that primarily display information and at most require a contact us form or some basic CRUD. So, naturally, given what may be an unconscious existential dread that one day the world may realise that front-end is more or less solved, front-end developers like to make sure that there's always something new to do, rather than admit that a problem is more or less solved. And thus fashion is born. Clothing was also a problem solved. We figured out that we needed shoes, trousers, shirts, jumpers when it's cold, coats when it's raining, etc. But once you have those, well, the tailor has no income. So the idea emerges that we need to have nice shoes, shirts and trousers for special occasions. And that perhaps some clothing items are better than other clothing items. And what if you don't want to dress in white and grey tomorrow, perhaps you'd like to be eye-catching? And so, fashion was born. The basic template is the same. You have some fabric that covers your legs, genitals, torso, arms etc. and the lower half is, more often than not, a different garment to the top half, to allow for easy swapping of components for different looks etc. But the base structure is the same. And if you are so inclined, you can have a totally bespoke and crazy item of clothing made for you by a designer. Sound familiar?
- Uehreka 5y ago
  Honestly, in my experience, the drive for bespoke styles isn't from developers, but from product folks and stakeholders. For instance, I once had to build a CMS UI with a dropdown where users could pick how they wanted to sort their search results. The product folks also asked me to add a "Show Translations" option in the dropdown, which wasn't a sort order, and could be toggled separately. They insisted that it needed to be in this dropdown and not a separate UI control, and since they generally know what the users want better than I do, I went with it. I've semi-frequently had to build custom tree views and tree selectors with multiple modes of operation and various amenities. And sometimes the way those complicated widgets are built requires that we customize more basic components like split-buttons or dropdowns to match so that users aren't thrown off. Sometimes all of this can be accomplished by taking a library like Bootstrap and applying a theme. But sometimes the theme gets so intense that we realize we're basically just building Material UI on top of Bootstrap's code, and it makes more sense to use that library instead. And as mentioned before, sometimes there are just things that we can't get from Bootstrap or Material, but that we're going to use fairly often (last I checked, Bootstrap didn't have a 5-star rating widget). The "It's Fashion!" narrative seems very appealing to people on HN, to the point that I'd advise people to double check that they're not falling for confirmation bias before proffering it as an explanation.
deltarholamda 5y ago
Government agencies love making standards. It provides busy work for the many interns and gives the desk workers a sense of joie de vivre because they're "making a difference." I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can get to the bottom page links that I'm actually looking for. I wonder why this is so difficult. Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. It's really weird that "design meetings" have completely eliminated usability on the damned home page.
- ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  >Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. My favorite thing about google's home page is having their elaborate doodles load just as I'm about to tap on the search box, leading me to an unintended search. Function over form at its finest. I've resorted to bookmarking an empty search results page.
  - haltcase 5y ago
    I know everyone has their own workflow, but I'm still surprised anyone actually goes to Google's home page anymore what with their search bar being accessible from practically anywhere (browser address bar for example). I don't remember the last time I actually went to the Google home page. What leads you there these days?
    - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
      My default address bar search is DDG, but need to fallback to google at times, and I keep my iPhone relatively google-free (Other than google voice).
      - stevenhuang 5y ago
        Use !g at start or end of your query to query google https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
sdunwoody 5y ago
Using a custom library over Bootstrap would potentially offer them the following benefits: * Full control over browser support (Government Agencies are likely to have to support older browser than Bootstrap for example would support). * Full control over accessibility (as far as I know, Bootstrap is not entirely accessible). * Ability to limit customisation to more closely fit any government style guide etc. * Not needing to update the version they are using whenever Twitter drop support for older versions, as they completely control the development life cycle and how long they support each version for. Possibly some other ones I have missed as well. Would they have saved money in the long term by using Bootstrap? Quite possibly (although I think it is hard to say definitively, and I really doubt creating this library cost significant amounts of money). Would using Bootstrap have resulted in sites that didn't look as nice? I highly suspect so.
Aeolun 5y ago
At least for our business, we need the components to do fairly specific things that are not, or only partially supported by pre-build components. So we make our own. Now they’d suck for anyone else to use, but they’re perfect for us.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >At least for our business, we need the components to do fairly specific things that are not, or only partially supported by pre-build components. I would say the moment you are dealing with business logic you are no longer dealing with something that can seriously be called a "component", that's just application development. And if you are spending developer time to build custom HTML select boxes or dropdowns in the year 2022 you're really doing something wrong.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > And if you are spending developer time to build custom HTML select boxes or dropdowns in the year 2022 you're really doing something wrong. You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.
rado 5y ago
BS is an opinionated framework aimed towards app devs who need UI for their web app ASAP. It's not suitable for all cases and required some tweaking to boot up (rounded buttons, hidden focus ring etc).
tvanantwerp 5y ago
I would assume that the USWDS are built with section 508 compliance in mind, and I'm not sure Bootstrap, et al., care about that. https://www.section508.gov/ https://www.section508.gov/
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  First thing that came to mind when I clicked that link was "I wonder if those blue-on-blue hyperlinks are compliant?" because man, my eyes are getting old.
dpedu 5y ago
As someone who does exactly this - building a website with Bootstrap or similar tools will get you 90% of the way there in terms of how closely your functional product matches its design. The remaining 10% requires fighting Bootstrap (since this is css, this means overriding rules). This is annoying and produces a fragile resulting code. Maybe it's a reason why the 90-90 rule exists. Instead, I choose to write exactly what's needed instead of trying to shoehorn in something to save time initially.
- vsareto 5y ago
  The shoehorning can come from designers who don't put things together using bootstrap components as their design language. Then the developer tries to do forbidden CSS alchemy and go from a Bootstrap component to the designer component. That's using an opinionated framework when your designers don't share the same opinions which often will make things more difficult. Bootstrap and other opinionated frameworks are super handy when you don't have designs/designers though.
bobabob 5y ago
I call that the @tiangolo/FastAPI pattern of open source software. After individuals noticed that it's possible to make tons of money through donations/sponsors on Github and providing support for their OSS many just rebrand libraries by sugar coating abstractions on top of it (what FastAPI did to Starlette) and trying to own all parts of the development (by not giving access to anyone on the project for example) so that they own they're seen as the only person able to provide true support for it. See https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 and https://github.com/tiangolo https://github.com/tiangolo
1shooner 5y ago
Section 508. Even if Bootstrap might support it for now (and I don't know that it does), there's no guarantee it will continue to.

hallway_monitor 5y ago

Didn't you mean designers? In my experience, that's who loves pushing low-value efforts like this (yes, at the scale of the US government, Google etc it may be warranted). The real problem is you have too many designers on staff and they have found something to keep themselves busy.

brimble 5y ago
In my experience, PMs and middle managers drive a fair amount of unnecessary design work. Looks better in a PowerPoint than most things do, I reckon.
jonshariat 5y ago
(full disclosure: I am a designer) While I agree with you in general, I think the US gov has an excuse while others may not: they have much stricter laws and requirements they HAVE to meet.

somehnacct3757 5y ago

I would find real peace of mind in a design system maintained by a government that guarantees compliance with that government's accessibility requirements.

gunsch 5y ago
This one's the real answer (or at least a substantial part of it). On VA.gov, the USWDS components (and their composition into a modular forms system) was a large part of making sure that applications met the accessibility needs of the general public. Source: I was the VA.gov engineering lead for awhile
sakopov 5y ago
Any kind of technical compliance by government is guaranteed to be old and obsolete in the near future. The reality of the situation is that this "design system" is a waste of time and it will never iterate as fast as other systems maintained by industry experts in web compliance and accessibility. This is just a case where folks are happy that our government isn't doing shit in Dreamweaver anymore and has moved on to something that resembles progress. However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available.
- p_l 5y ago
  Considering that accessibility standards worldwide are mostly pushed forward by governments, even when there's action outside of it it's usually due to "government put laws stating specific requirements". While accessibility is usually afterthought unless directly whacked by a fine, and you can't just use "what's already available". As for streamlining - this is streamlining, making it so that multiple entities within government that all need to build websites can use a common shared resource instead of duplicating the work (even "going shopping" for external solution takes valuable time).
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Any kind of technical compliance by government is guaranteed to be old and obsolete in the near future. The reality of the situation is that this "design system" is a waste of time and it will never iterate as fast as other systems maintained by industry experts in web compliance and accessibility. You really ought to check out how fast this design system has iterated to date: https://github.com/uswds/uswds/releases https://github.com/uswds/uswds/releases > However, government should be focusing on streamlining government operations, not developing accessibility standards and reinventing the same wheel. Leave that to professionals and use what's already available. First, I'm not sure why you think accessibility doesn't fall under streamlining government operations. Second, the folks at USDS are top professionals from industry and are limited to a four year "tour of duty", so they aren't lifelong government employees.

clairity 5y ago

bootstrap is a common design system base for companies that can't afford nor needs a full design team. it's a one-size-fits-none approach, but it's close enough that devs can wrangle it into shape well enough. larger entities with multiple, decoupled teams often move toward developing their own living design systems as bootstrap no longer fits the many idiosyncracies of the organization. i'm really looking forward to design systems that no longer rely on set breakpoints/grids and move to fully flexible, responsive layouts and components (come on, container queries!).

wanda 5y ago

Nope, you're not missing anything really, but I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3. I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use. In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda. Front-end isn't that difficult for websites that primarily display information and at most require a contact us form or some basic CRUD. So, naturally, given what may be an unconscious existential dread that one day the world may realise that front-end is more or less solved, front-end developers like to make sure that there's always something new to do, rather than admit that a problem is more or less solved. And thus fashion is born. Clothing was also a problem solved. We figured out that we needed shoes, trousers, shirts, jumpers when it's cold, coats when it's raining, etc. But once you have those, well, the tailor has no income. So the idea emerges that we need to have nice shoes, shirts and trousers for special occasions. And that perhaps some clothing items are better than other clothing items. And what if you don't want to dress in white and grey tomorrow, perhaps you'd like to be eye-catching? And so, fashion was born. The basic template is the same. You have some fabric that covers your legs, genitals, torso, arms etc. and the lower half is, more often than not, a different garment to the top half, to allow for easy swapping of components for different looks etc. But the base structure is the same. And if you are so inclined, you can have a totally bespoke and crazy item of clothing made for you by a designer. Sound familiar?

Uehreka 5y ago
Honestly, in my experience, the drive for bespoke styles isn't from developers, but from product folks and stakeholders. For instance, I once had to build a CMS UI with a dropdown where users could pick how they wanted to sort their search results. The product folks also asked me to add a "Show Translations" option in the dropdown, which wasn't a sort order, and could be toggled separately. They insisted that it needed to be in this dropdown and not a separate UI control, and since they generally know what the users want better than I do, I went with it. I've semi-frequently had to build custom tree views and tree selectors with multiple modes of operation and various amenities. And sometimes the way those complicated widgets are built requires that we customize more basic components like split-buttons or dropdowns to match so that users aren't thrown off. Sometimes all of this can be accomplished by taking a library like Bootstrap and applying a theme. But sometimes the theme gets so intense that we realize we're basically just building Material UI on top of Bootstrap's code, and it makes more sense to use that library instead. And as mentioned before, sometimes there are just things that we can't get from Bootstrap or Material, but that we're going to use fairly often (last I checked, Bootstrap didn't have a 5-star rating widget). The "It's Fashion!" narrative seems very appealing to people on HN, to the point that I'd advise people to double check that they're not falling for confirmation bias before proffering it as an explanation.

deltarholamda 5y ago

Government agencies love making standards. It provides busy work for the many interns and gives the desk workers a sense of joie de vivre because they're "making a difference." I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can get to the bottom page links that I'm actually looking for. I wonder why this is so difficult. Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. It's really weird that "design meetings" have completely eliminated usability on the damned home page.

ProfessorLayton 5y ago
>Everybody has seen Google's landing page. Function over form. My favorite thing about google's home page is having their elaborate doodles load just as I'm about to tap on the search box, leading me to an unintended search. Function over form at its finest. I've resorted to bookmarking an empty search results page.
- haltcase 5y ago
  I know everyone has their own workflow, but I'm still surprised anyone actually goes to Google's home page anymore what with their search bar being accessible from practically anywhere (browser address bar for example). I don't remember the last time I actually went to the Google home page. What leads you there these days?
  - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    My default address bar search is DDG, but need to fallback to google at times, and I keep my iPhone relatively google-free (Other than google voice).
    - stevenhuang 5y ago
      Use !g at start or end of your query to query google https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang

sdunwoody 5y ago

Using a custom library over Bootstrap would potentially offer them the following benefits: * Full control over browser support (Government Agencies are likely to have to support older browser than Bootstrap for example would support). * Full control over accessibility (as far as I know, Bootstrap is not entirely accessible). * Ability to limit customisation to more closely fit any government style guide etc. * Not needing to update the version they are using whenever Twitter drop support for older versions, as they completely control the development life cycle and how long they support each version for. Possibly some other ones I have missed as well. Would they have saved money in the long term by using Bootstrap? Quite possibly (although I think it is hard to say definitively, and I really doubt creating this library cost significant amounts of money). Would using Bootstrap have resulted in sites that didn't look as nice? I highly suspect so.

Aeolun 5y ago

At least for our business, we need the components to do fairly specific things that are not, or only partially supported by pre-build components. So we make our own. Now they’d suck for anyone else to use, but they’re perfect for us.

ramesh31 5y ago
>At least for our business, we need the components to do fairly specific things that are not, or only partially supported by pre-build components. I would say the moment you are dealing with business logic you are no longer dealing with something that can seriously be called a "component", that's just application development. And if you are spending developer time to build custom HTML select boxes or dropdowns in the year 2022 you're really doing something wrong.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > And if you are spending developer time to build custom HTML select boxes or dropdowns in the year 2022 you're really doing something wrong. You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.

rado 5y ago

BS is an opinionated framework aimed towards app devs who need UI for their web app ASAP. It's not suitable for all cases and required some tweaking to boot up (rounded buttons, hidden focus ring etc).

tvanantwerp 5y ago

I would assume that the USWDS are built with section 508 compliance in mind, and I'm not sure Bootstrap, et al., care about that. https://www.section508.gov/ https://www.section508.gov/

rootusrootus 5y ago
First thing that came to mind when I clicked that link was "I wonder if those blue-on-blue hyperlinks are compliant?" because man, my eyes are getting old.

dpedu 5y ago

As someone who does exactly this - building a website with Bootstrap or similar tools will get you 90% of the way there in terms of how closely your functional product matches its design. The remaining 10% requires fighting Bootstrap (since this is css, this means overriding rules). This is annoying and produces a fragile resulting code. Maybe it's a reason why the 90-90 rule exists. Instead, I choose to write exactly what's needed instead of trying to shoehorn in something to save time initially.

vsareto 5y ago
The shoehorning can come from designers who don't put things together using bootstrap components as their design language. Then the developer tries to do forbidden CSS alchemy and go from a Bootstrap component to the designer component. That's using an opinionated framework when your designers don't share the same opinions which often will make things more difficult. Bootstrap and other opinionated frameworks are super handy when you don't have designs/designers though.

bobabob 5y ago

I call that the @tiangolo/FastAPI pattern of open source software. After individuals noticed that it's possible to make tons of money through donations/sponsors on Github and providing support for their OSS many just rebrand libraries by sugar coating abstractions on top of it (what FastAPI did to Starlette) and trying to own all parts of the development (by not giving access to anyone on the project for example) so that they own they're seen as the only person able to provide true support for it. See https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/4263 and https://github.com/tiangolo https://github.com/tiangolo

1shooner 5y ago

Section 508. Even if Bootstrap might support it for now (and I don't know that it does), there's no guarantee it will continue to.