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Maintenance. If somebody designed a site to look a certain way on a certain size of screen using "span-whatever" classes, you have to either a) remove them and

Maintenance. If somebody designed a site to look a certain way on a certain size of screen using "span-whatever" classes, you have to either a) remove them and rewrite the CSS b) change each one to the correct number of "spans" or c) override span6 to actually mean span8 in some cases. This becomes an even bigger nightmare when you're designing for resolution independence, which everyone should be doing all the time. If I want a different separation character for inline lists, I should be able to make that change in the CSS instead of doing a find-replace for every instance of <span class=sep>/</span>. That's what the CSS :after pseudo element was designed for. The "hide" class should be added by JavaScript if its going to be added at all, because having a "hide" class with no way to toggle it off is wasting the users time and bandwidth and you should be ashamed. I could go on and on, but I have run in to all these issues and more on real-world projects, and in my opinion, whatever marginal decrease in development time you get from bootstrap is not worth the technical debt that comes with it.

lucisferre 14y ago
But as a matter of practice any major restyling is almost certainly going to involve changes to the structure, organization and even content of the HTML anyways. With smaller changes it seems trivial either way. If I just want to do subtle restyling to a Bootstrap based website I don't really need to throw the baby out with the bathwater do I? Now correct me if I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "semantic" here but basically you're saying the HTML has no influence on layout or design. That just doesn't make much sense to me. In this way all design has to be done strictly through CSS. Everything kind of "thing" will require a complete set of specific styles because it's "semantic" even if it reuses elements of other things. I mean this in the end is the reason so many people like working with Bootstrap it allows things to be built with some efficiency. Major components are defined and reusable. Semantic HTML to me is a bit like having to hand craft every individual widget, and cog when all I really needed was some off the shelf parts and maybe build customized dashboard and add a bit spiffy paint. Honestly, I am on the fence on this. I love the idea of purely semantic markup but always seem to see this tradeoff in reusability whenever persuing it.

lucisferre 14y ago

But as a matter of practice any major restyling is almost certainly going to involve changes to the structure, organization and even content of the HTML anyways. With smaller changes it seems trivial either way. If I just want to do subtle restyling to a Bootstrap based website I don't really need to throw the baby out with the bathwater do I? Now correct me if I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "semantic" here but basically you're saying the HTML has no influence on layout or design. That just doesn't make much sense to me. In this way all design has to be done strictly through CSS. Everything kind of "thing" will require a complete set of specific styles because it's "semantic" even if it reuses elements of other things. I mean this in the end is the reason so many people like working with Bootstrap it allows things to be built with some efficiency. Major components are defined and reusable. Semantic HTML to me is a bit like having to hand craft every individual widget, and cog when all I really needed was some off the shelf parts and maybe build customized dashboard and add a bit spiffy paint. Honestly, I am on the fence on this. I love the idea of purely semantic markup but always seem to see this tradeoff in reusability whenever persuing it.