5 ms·

First of all, I want to say that I like the vibrant colors, small size, and checkable buttons. Smaller (and JS-less) CSS frameworks is something that I've been

First of all, I want to say that I like the vibrant colors, small size, and checkable buttons. Smaller (and JS-less) CSS frameworks is something that I've been crusading for for years now. Secondly, I'm the creator of Min (http://minfwk.com http://minfwk.com), a fellow small CSS framework. Min is only 995 bytes - 5 times smaller. It also is more widely used, has feature parity with Bootstrap through the Min Bootstrap plugin, supports IE5.5+, is valid CSS, and doesn't have browser bugs. There's also an easy way to migrate from Bootstrap to Min (the Bootstrap->Min converter.) Why would someone use Picnic.css rather than Min? I'd like to see the advantages of Picnic.css straight from the creator, since it seems you're answering questions in this thread. It seems one of the advantages you're touting is the "invasive"ness, which is a cool approach (I don't see Min taking that approach for various reasons but I think it can be a better choice for many use cases.) Another seems to be the grid naming system. What other things would make someone prefer Picnic.css for their project?

bnejad 12y ago
Its always good to have options. As much as I'm supportive of promoting your own work its a little bit in bad taste to smash and promote your project one a submission like this.
- owenversteeg 12y ago
  Whoops. I didn't mean it in a negative way - I was hoping that the creator could mention some other advantages of using Picnic.css that I missed. I've edited the comment to focus less on the downsides of Picnic and instead focus on the differences of Picnic and Min.
  - exodust 12y ago
    You mention IE5.5 support four times on your homepage. Nobody is using IE5.5 anymore, so that's not an attractive selling point, and slightly odd that you think it might be a selling point. The Picnic thing has "subtle animated buttons" which may be appealing to some looking for a certain design edge out of the box. Personally I roll my own everything, I don't use grids or bootstrap, so not sure why I'm even looking at this thread. I'm not the typical frontend developer though apparently. Div class="row" is not something you'll see in my code, ever. I'm not going back to table layouts by faking rows and columns with divs. That to me is working against the grain of HTML and CSS. When you start working *with" the grain, with the native behaviour of HTML elements, suddenly a lot more is possible and easier to accomplish when it comes to responsiveness and compatibility. But anyway.. carry on with your "not table based" layouts!
    - owenversteeg 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! * Although "nobody" (if parts of China and governments are nobody) uses IE5.5, plenty use IE6, IE7, and IE8, which aren't supported by many CSS frameworks. * Min also has subtle animations - only of background color though. I used to have more 3D-looking buttons but those were criticized for being too prescriptive - which I agree with; IMHO you shouldn't be able to tell what CSS framework a site uses by looking at it. * You have a really interesting point about grid systems and table-based layouts. That's something I'll have to come back to when I'm slightly more awake.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      > I'm not the typical frontend developer though apparently. Div class="row" is not something you'll see in my code, ever. I'm not going back to table layouts by faking rows and columns with divs. That to me is working against the grain of HTML and CSS. When you start working *with" the grain, with the native behaviour of HTML elements, suddenly a lot more is possible and easier to accomplish when it comes to responsiveness and compatibility. But anyway.. carry on with your "not table based" layouts! Interesting. As somebody who loathes front-end development, I'm curious to know how you work against what I consider to be the shameful lack of support for laying out elements on a page in a coherent way (something which has been present in widget toolkits for fat clients since forever). I still remember with dreads the hacks necessary to achieve a three-columns fluid layout in a cross-browser fashion, and I'm certainly not going back to that.
      - poxrud 12y ago
        There is no need to litter your HTML with non semantic div tags that just represent rows and columns. I'm a big fan of using a framework like Susy (there are others as well) that just lets you assign the number of columns an element spans. Something like: .logo { span (3 of 10); } nav { span(7 of 10); } So you can get columns without touching your HTML.
        mercurial 12y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
RegEx 12y ago
This is extremely tacky. Of course you meant to put the framework down - your first statement shows you think this is a competition, and you don't want to "lose" Your edit is just to try and convince others and yourself that you weren't being a complete tool. (You were). It seems you had no other intention in your comment than to belittle the authors work and puff yourself up. If you actually thought you could learn something from the author you would have treated them with some degree of respect.
- owenversteeg 12y ago
  First of all, I waited until two other people in the thread had mentioned Min before mentioning it. Second of all, I think this is an extremely relevant place to mention Min. Finally, I've edited my post more to show how I think Picnic is really interesting and has a cool approach. Good now?
- sequoia 12y ago
  Oh go soak your head. Commenter points out what they likes about OP's tool, describes their own, and asks for a sales pitch from OP about why someone should use their (OP's) tool. There's nothing wrong with any of this-- why do you think OP posted their framework here if not to receive feedback & have an opportunity to sell their tool? People complaining that bringing up an alternate CSS framework for compare/contrast in a thread on a new CSS framework need to chill.
  - RegEx 12y ago
    Their edited-edited post is much more approachable. Bringing up alternatives is great, that's why I generally bookmark threads like this. Passive aggressive rhetorical questions are not nearly as conducive to productive conversation. I commend them for changing the tone of their post.
heyadayo 12y ago
One answer might be that they sell it a bit better through site design and example. I've got no horse in this race though
- owenversteeg 12y ago
  Thanks for the first actual answer! What don't you like about Min's site design?
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    On the docs page, everything looks really big. It's a bit of a nitpick, but I think - in comparison to Picnic at least - it doesn't bode well for the default attractiveness of a site using Min.
  - arsenerei 12y ago
    I also really like what min aims to accomplish. These are my observations and recommendations to improve the site. * h1 font-size should be around 2.2em. It's far too large at the moment. * .contain width seems best around 1020px. You want a thinner width to improve readability. * All buttons and clickables should not shift the page in any unexpected ways. Clicking on the buttons, for instance, go to the top of the page. One solution would be to onclick="return false;" on relevant elements. * The "Min Basics" sections is a bit wordy. I think there's some superfluous information and I think the word count can be cut in half. * The Download page doesn't cleanly separate the calls to actions enough for my tastes. I would prefer having a "CDN Delivery" section and a "Download" section. I believe most people who want a minimal framework will know the difference. * The layout of the "GET CSS" button and the textarea seems...off. The button is too large and the textarea dimensions are, again, somehow off. Other than that, I think you've done a great job explaining the benefits of your framework, have given a solid overview of is features and I appreciate the humor of the sea monster. Keep up the great work!
lsh 12y ago
Nuts to those calling bad taste: if I had a competing framework I'd be making it part of the conversation, too. Besides being tiny, how does Min stack up against Picnic, owenversteeg? I expect a bias opinion, don't worry ;)
- owenversteeg 12y ago
  Thank you! At least one person doesn't think I'm a "complete tool" :) Personally I think Min's largest advantages over Picnic are: * more features (button sizing, messages, input addons, 12-column grid instead of 6-column grid) * vastly better browser support (not only does Min work on IE5.5+ but also it is tested across hundreds of browser and device configurations before each release) * Unprescriptive - it's incredibly easy to override Min's styles and turn it into something else while still making use of Min's extensive testing and features. With Bootstrap you have to use !importants and strange selectors; with Min overriding things is easy as pie. * LESS/Sass versions * An icon-set that works out of the box
  - manojlds 12y ago
    Your points on Bootstrap customization - are those for v2 or v3? I have used v3 and customized I a lot by just overriding the variables and using the mixins.
jwatte 12y ago
The "Docs" and "Download" buttons on the front page have different height and font sizes. (Chrome on android)
franciscop 12y ago
Truth be told, I didn't know Min when creating Picnic, but I loved it when I saw it and will try it for sure. The main point of creating Picnic CSS was to make a more complete and semantic version than Pure but not as large as Bootstrap. Also, adding some interaction like pushable and toggable buttons, hover states and responsive navbar which were traditionally done with Javascript. These are the pros I think from Picnic over Min: * <input> actually has some light validation. This is not yet in the DOC though. * Forms are more consistent since I've styled all elements to look alike. * Responsive grid (mobile first). * Built on top of Normalize, so many of the elements have actually a lot of intensive external testing * Default <select> that looks nice (couldn't find Min's one so I am not sure whether this is actually something better) * The invasiveness main advantage is that, with one single line, you have Picnicss already working for you, while in most other frameworks you have to be constantly checking the documentation to see what class names to use. * Under 1 week of development. This is not a final version, just a point where I wanted to stop and ask for feedback, so I showed it in HN and got better feedback I could ever imagine. * [opinion] Encourage the use of Fontello instead of the old glyphs * [opinion] The style in general looks more personalized with Picnic * [opinion] Not supporting IE5 - IE7. Depending on your audience, this is a pro or a con. I consider it a pro since the statistics (for most America-Europe) tells us that there's almost no one using it, and it cuts a lot of code/testing and allows for using the latest improvements. And the Cons: * Buggy. It's a very young project so it's only normal that it has some bugs. I'm fixing them as fast as I can. * Low browser support. While I wanted to support IE8 initially, I decided not to. This is because my audience is mostly 18 - 30 years old people. However this really depends on your audience so you must test it, but Picnic also degrades nicely in most of the cases. * Incomplete documentation. There are some things that are not yet documented. * Incomplete testing. Any help about how to test it on many platforms easily would be greatly welcome. Note how some of the pro/cons are biased. However I couldn't see you mentioning any disadvantages or limits for Min. What do you think it's lacking? Another point is variety. It's great to have many different options to choose, and I saved minfwk.com and will surely use it at some point. PS, I have writen so many times the size of Picnic at so many stages that I've confused everyone. It's actually 2.7kb when minimized and zipped, so only 3 times bigger (;
- owenversteeg 12y ago
swah 12y ago
One reason could be: "Picnic's creator has better taste." Sincerely, Picnic.css is selling itself better. Min's site doesn't look very good. People aren't even going to care if its semantic or whatever. This looks particularly bad: http://minfwk.com/download.html http://minfwk.com/download.html - a tiny textarea and a giant button piled up, nothing is aligned, etc. And you're trying to sell me grids. (Sorry for being so hard - I'm trying (and failing) to find a better way to write.)

bnejad 12y ago

Its always good to have options. As much as I'm supportive of promoting your own work its a little bit in bad taste to smash and promote your project one a submission like this.

owenversteeg 12y ago
Whoops. I didn't mean it in a negative way - I was hoping that the creator could mention some other advantages of using Picnic.css that I missed. I've edited the comment to focus less on the downsides of Picnic and instead focus on the differences of Picnic and Min.
- exodust 12y ago
  You mention IE5.5 support four times on your homepage. Nobody is using IE5.5 anymore, so that's not an attractive selling point, and slightly odd that you think it might be a selling point. The Picnic thing has "subtle animated buttons" which may be appealing to some looking for a certain design edge out of the box. Personally I roll my own everything, I don't use grids or bootstrap, so not sure why I'm even looking at this thread. I'm not the typical frontend developer though apparently. Div class="row" is not something you'll see in my code, ever. I'm not going back to table layouts by faking rows and columns with divs. That to me is working against the grain of HTML and CSS. When you start working *with" the grain, with the native behaviour of HTML elements, suddenly a lot more is possible and easier to accomplish when it comes to responsiveness and compatibility. But anyway.. carry on with your "not table based" layouts!
  - owenversteeg 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! * Although "nobody" (if parts of China and governments are nobody) uses IE5.5, plenty use IE6, IE7, and IE8, which aren't supported by many CSS frameworks. * Min also has subtle animations - only of background color though. I used to have more 3D-looking buttons but those were criticized for being too prescriptive - which I agree with; IMHO you shouldn't be able to tell what CSS framework a site uses by looking at it. * You have a really interesting point about grid systems and table-based layouts. That's something I'll have to come back to when I'm slightly more awake.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    > I'm not the typical frontend developer though apparently. Div class="row" is not something you'll see in my code, ever. I'm not going back to table layouts by faking rows and columns with divs. That to me is working against the grain of HTML and CSS. When you start working *with" the grain, with the native behaviour of HTML elements, suddenly a lot more is possible and easier to accomplish when it comes to responsiveness and compatibility. But anyway.. carry on with your "not table based" layouts! Interesting. As somebody who loathes front-end development, I'm curious to know how you work against what I consider to be the shameful lack of support for laying out elements on a page in a coherent way (something which has been present in widget toolkits for fat clients since forever). I still remember with dreads the hacks necessary to achieve a three-columns fluid layout in a cross-browser fashion, and I'm certainly not going back to that.
    - poxrud 12y ago
      There is no need to litter your HTML with non semantic div tags that just represent rows and columns. I'm a big fan of using a framework like Susy (there are others as well) that just lets you assign the number of columns an element spans. Something like: .logo { span (3 of 10); } nav { span(7 of 10); } So you can get columns without touching your HTML.
      - mercurial 12y ago
        Interesting, thanks.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

RegEx 12y ago

This is extremely tacky. Of course you meant to put the framework down - your first statement shows you think this is a competition, and you don't want to "lose" Your edit is just to try and convince others and yourself that you weren't being a complete tool. (You were). It seems you had no other intention in your comment than to belittle the authors work and puff yourself up. If you actually thought you could learn something from the author you would have treated them with some degree of respect.

owenversteeg 12y ago
First of all, I waited until two other people in the thread had mentioned Min before mentioning it. Second of all, I think this is an extremely relevant place to mention Min. Finally, I've edited my post more to show how I think Picnic is really interesting and has a cool approach. Good now?
sequoia 12y ago
Oh go soak your head. Commenter points out what they likes about OP's tool, describes their own, and asks for a sales pitch from OP about why someone should use their (OP's) tool. There's nothing wrong with any of this-- why do you think OP posted their framework here if not to receive feedback & have an opportunity to sell their tool? People complaining that bringing up an alternate CSS framework for compare/contrast in a thread on a new CSS framework need to chill.
- RegEx 12y ago
  Their edited-edited post is much more approachable. Bringing up alternatives is great, that's why I generally bookmark threads like this. Passive aggressive rhetorical questions are not nearly as conducive to productive conversation. I commend them for changing the tone of their post.

heyadayo 12y ago

One answer might be that they sell it a bit better through site design and example. I've got no horse in this race though

owenversteeg 12y ago
Thanks for the first actual answer! What don't you like about Min's site design?
- yellowapple 12y ago
  On the docs page, everything looks really big. It's a bit of a nitpick, but I think - in comparison to Picnic at least - it doesn't bode well for the default attractiveness of a site using Min.
- arsenerei 12y ago
  I also really like what min aims to accomplish. These are my observations and recommendations to improve the site. * h1 font-size should be around 2.2em. It's far too large at the moment. * .contain width seems best around 1020px. You want a thinner width to improve readability. * All buttons and clickables should not shift the page in any unexpected ways. Clicking on the buttons, for instance, go to the top of the page. One solution would be to onclick="return false;" on relevant elements. * The "Min Basics" sections is a bit wordy. I think there's some superfluous information and I think the word count can be cut in half. * The Download page doesn't cleanly separate the calls to actions enough for my tastes. I would prefer having a "CDN Delivery" section and a "Download" section. I believe most people who want a minimal framework will know the difference. * The layout of the "GET CSS" button and the textarea seems...off. The button is too large and the textarea dimensions are, again, somehow off. Other than that, I think you've done a great job explaining the benefits of your framework, have given a solid overview of is features and I appreciate the humor of the sea monster. Keep up the great work!

lsh 12y ago

Nuts to those calling bad taste: if I had a competing framework I'd be making it part of the conversation, too. Besides being tiny, how does Min stack up against Picnic, owenversteeg? I expect a bias opinion, don't worry ;)

owenversteeg 12y ago
Thank you! At least one person doesn't think I'm a "complete tool" :) Personally I think Min's largest advantages over Picnic are: * more features (button sizing, messages, input addons, 12-column grid instead of 6-column grid) * vastly better browser support (not only does Min work on IE5.5+ but also it is tested across hundreds of browser and device configurations before each release) * Unprescriptive - it's incredibly easy to override Min's styles and turn it into something else while still making use of Min's extensive testing and features. With Bootstrap you have to use !importants and strange selectors; with Min overriding things is easy as pie. * LESS/Sass versions * An icon-set that works out of the box
- manojlds 12y ago
  Your points on Bootstrap customization - are those for v2 or v3? I have used v3 and customized I a lot by just overriding the variables and using the mixins.

jwatte 12y ago

The "Docs" and "Download" buttons on the front page have different height and font sizes. (Chrome on android)

franciscop 12y ago

Truth be told, I didn't know Min when creating Picnic, but I loved it when I saw it and will try it for sure. The main point of creating Picnic CSS was to make a more complete and semantic version than Pure but not as large as Bootstrap. Also, adding some interaction like pushable and toggable buttons, hover states and responsive navbar which were traditionally done with Javascript. These are the pros I think from Picnic over Min: * <input> actually has some light validation. This is not yet in the DOC though. * Forms are more consistent since I've styled all elements to look alike. * Responsive grid (mobile first). * Built on top of Normalize, so many of the elements have actually a lot of intensive external testing * Default <select> that looks nice (couldn't find Min's one so I am not sure whether this is actually something better) * The invasiveness main advantage is that, with one single line, you have Picnicss already working for you, while in most other frameworks you have to be constantly checking the documentation to see what class names to use. * Under 1 week of development. This is not a final version, just a point where I wanted to stop and ask for feedback, so I showed it in HN and got better feedback I could ever imagine. * [opinion] Encourage the use of Fontello instead of the old glyphs * [opinion] The style in general looks more personalized with Picnic * [opinion] Not supporting IE5 - IE7. Depending on your audience, this is a pro or a con. I consider it a pro since the statistics (for most America-Europe) tells us that there's almost no one using it, and it cuts a lot of code/testing and allows for using the latest improvements. And the Cons: * Buggy. It's a very young project so it's only normal that it has some bugs. I'm fixing them as fast as I can. * Low browser support. While I wanted to support IE8 initially, I decided not to. This is because my audience is mostly 18 - 30 years old people. However this really depends on your audience so you must test it, but Picnic also degrades nicely in most of the cases. * Incomplete documentation. There are some things that are not yet documented. * Incomplete testing. Any help about how to test it on many platforms easily would be greatly welcome. Note how some of the pro/cons are biased. However I couldn't see you mentioning any disadvantages or limits for Min. What do you think it's lacking? Another point is variety. It's great to have many different options to choose, and I saved minfwk.com and will surely use it at some point. PS, I have writen so many times the size of Picnic at so many stages that I've confused everyone. It's actually 2.7kb when minimized and zipped, so only 3 times bigger (;

owenversteeg 12y ago

swah 12y ago

One reason could be: "Picnic's creator has better taste." Sincerely, Picnic.css is selling itself better. Min's site doesn't look very good. People aren't even going to care if its semantic or whatever. This looks particularly bad: http://minfwk.com/download.html http://minfwk.com/download.html - a tiny textarea and a giant button piled up, nothing is aligned, etc. And you're trying to sell me grids. (Sorry for being so hard - I'm trying (and failing) to find a better way to write.)