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In my opinion, the only great thing about Bootstrap is the grid system and form styling, the rest is just useless cruft. As a front-end developer, I see the val

In my opinion, the only great thing about Bootstrap is the grid system and form styling, the rest is just useless cruft. As a front-end developer, I see the value in Bootstrap and I have used it before, but when installing it as a Bower component, it makes it harder to filter out the crap you don't need like button styling, header styling and other stuff Bootstrap includes that just bloats your CSS. To me, I find Bootstrap TOO opinionated, I spend a lot of my time overriding styles than I do setting them. In the real world unless it is your own project, you are being given designs and fitting the style of a PSD file into Bootstrap can be more trouble than it is worth. These days I actually use Foundation by Zurb which I think is arguably one of the best front-end CSS libraries out there, it allows greater control and offers some awesome Javascript components. Not only that, it has a great grid system like Bootstrap, but it is by far, the least opinionated and most powerful front-end library out there. Cudos for trimming the fat and offering an alternative for those who use Bootstrap. My only nitpick is those bevelled buttons don't look very nice and the classes for the grid system using fractions might be a little confusion for some who are bad at maths and fractions (like me). I prefer having the option of putting the number in the class like in Bootstrap: col-md-6 as opposed to using a class called "half"

illicium 12y ago
The best thing about Bootstrap is that it's ubiquitous -- every frontender has heard of it and can easily jump on a project that uses it -- and that there are a lot of integrations with frameworks, like angular-bootstrap or react-bootstrap, that don't tie you to using the stock jQuery plugins. This framework doesn't have anything that relies on JS magic, like button dropdowns, collapsing panes, etc, which are useful in real-world apps. I certainly wouldn't want to reimplement my own versions for every project. Bootstrap's cruft is a non-issue if you use the customizer [0], or, better yet, selectively import the components using LESS or SCSS [1]. [0] http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/less/bootstrap.less https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/less/bootstrap...
- DigitalSea 12y ago
  The JS components are a non-issue, I agree. However, the one problem with customising Bootstrap is if you're using a front-end dependency manager like Bower, as far as I am aware, you cannot easily customise the dependencies in Bootstrap if using Bower or Component. Sure, I could use a custom generated and downloaded version of the compiled CSS files, but then I loose the ability to change colours, fonts and whatnot using variables or the internal helper functions...
  - illicium 12y ago
    Not at all. If you use LESS/SASS, you can use your own variables and mixin overrides stored in a file outside bower_components. e.g. https://github.com/apigee/ui-framework/blob/master/less/core/bootstrap.less https://github.com/apigee/ui-framework/blob/master/less/core...

illicium 12y ago

The best thing about Bootstrap is that it's ubiquitous -- every frontender has heard of it and can easily jump on a project that uses it -- and that there are a lot of integrations with frameworks, like angular-bootstrap or react-bootstrap, that don't tie you to using the stock jQuery plugins. This framework doesn't have anything that relies on JS magic, like button dropdowns, collapsing panes, etc, which are useful in real-world apps. I certainly wouldn't want to reimplement my own versions for every project. Bootstrap's cruft is a non-issue if you use the customizer [0], or, better yet, selectively import the components using LESS or SCSS [1]. [0] http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ [1] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/less/bootstrap.less https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/less/bootstrap...

DigitalSea 12y ago
The JS components are a non-issue, I agree. However, the one problem with customising Bootstrap is if you're using a front-end dependency manager like Bower, as far as I am aware, you cannot easily customise the dependencies in Bootstrap if using Bower or Component. Sure, I could use a custom generated and downloaded version of the compiled CSS files, but then I loose the ability to change colours, fonts and whatnot using variables or the internal helper functions...
- illicium 12y ago
  Not at all. If you use LESS/SASS, you can use your own variables and mixin overrides stored in a file outside bower_components. e.g. https://github.com/apigee/ui-framework/blob/master/less/core/bootstrap.less https://github.com/apigee/ui-framework/blob/master/less/core...