Websites are a great example since the bloat is clearly visible on the developer's end. I decided to try using Foundation last week. The last time I worked on a

Websites are a great example since the bloat is clearly visible on the developer's end. I decided to try using Foundation last week. The last time I worked on a website I just generated some static HTML markup and filled it in with my own hand-built CSS. Nobody would give an award for that design, but it was functional enough. The Foundation install instructions first ask for three dependencies: Ruby, node.js, and git. Subsequently, through gem and npm, dozens of other dependencies were installed. The framework pushes multiple .js dependencies onto the served pages, and heavily encourages using either Compass or libsass to generate the final CSS, making it weigh considerably more. It even had tooling to automatically rebuild as a background process. All of this, and I basically just modified the example templates slightly to help me build a layout. In theory all sorts of other things could be done with that framework, but the nature of the software stack we have, at least in this domain, favors including the kitchen sink when you need a cup of water.