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State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

dannyherran.com

81–90 of 107 posts

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#81
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true this could be added to a list of nasty side effects of rampant enforcement of political correctness.

It's not true. The user didn't accuse them of being culturally insensitive. Rather, he argued that that automating the conversion was fool's errand, partly due to the differences between the various RTL languages. He suggested that the Bootstrap team point users to quality RTL themes instead of releasing a shoddy built-in RTL implementation. Perhaps this should be added to the list of instances of people dismissing v…

Ok, thanks for the clarification :-)

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#82
post #31

The key unanswered question, and for me the fundamental reason I switched from using Bootstrap to Foundation at work, is how designer friendly the two are. Bootstrap is fantastic when you want a site that looks like Bootstrap, these tend to be put together by developers. Foundation (at least was) much less opinionated and therefore when you're given a PSD by a designer much easier to implement. Have things improved o…

Ancedotal evidence: My company recently switched https://m.curiosity.com to Bootstrap from custom CSS, and spec'd the design almost entirely by PSDs. I don't think the site looks particularly Bootstrappy nor did it seem especially challenging to customize.

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#83
post #62

Any opinions about uikit [0]? From the presentation it look pretty full-featured and modular, I'd be interested to know what people who tried it think... [0]: http://getuikit.com/

I've been using it for about a year now, and have come to prefer it over bootstrap and foundation (it's grid system in particular). It's also well-documented, and has a clean/well-organized codebase.

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#84

My concern with both of these is that I'm slapping classes on all of my UI everywhere. Why can't a button just get all of the bootstrap btn styles automatically? Why not have forms look right just by selecting the elements that make them up? This is a problem for Foundation too. Does anyone know why they have chosen to do this?

It seems fairly over-opinionated for the framework to declare every button as exactly the same. What if a developer needs one orange square button and one normal, greyish-silver boostrap button. If every class is automatically applied to each button, you're going to need to override the styling for that specific orange, square button.

I quite frequently use Bootstrap but with almost all of it paired down to the absolute minimums. Bootstrap 3 (at least) was comprehensible and easy enough to whittle down by commenting out large swaths of UI. Usually, I simply use the Bootstrap grid since we have contracts who dance in and out of projects or new developers. Everyone can safely assume that they have "col-sm-" classes and know how they work.

I usually mimic bootstrap classes too like btn even if I can't recall the last time in the last 3+ years I've left any of its buttons/forms etc in tact.

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an attempt to do so. They were using an RTL-flipping tool and it all looked pretty cool (I built something with it) but then one of the people who manually flipped Bootstrap basically accused them of being culturally insensitive by trying to automate this task and they abandoned it.

"Culturally insensitive" wasn't part of the discussion. He listed specific technical and UX issues with their approach. Another commenter in this thread posted a link to the github discussion.

Having re-read the thread, I stand by my "in-a-nutshell" summary of it.

I don't think any of his technical arguments hold up. I'm also not sure that he would have convinced the Bootstrap team to have dropped this based on technical arguments if he hadn't seemed so annoyed, and made repeated references to how only people who speak the language should make certain decisions.

Some examples:

* the bug report is a command: "Stop developing RTL for Bootstrap!"

* the bug report ends with an exclamation point!

* the bug starts "I'm really annoyed..."

* "use cases that only natives can understand"

* A second command, bolded: "Remove it!"

I personally was inconvenienced by this because I was writing lots of bootstrap based .less, and if twitter and Bootstrap had worked together on an auto-flipping rtl system for Bootstrap then all the RTL users of my code would have got a far better service. Instead only those who use the Bootstrap CSS essentially as-it-comes get a manually RTL'd version from a 3rd party. A tool that can automate that work sounds like a far better deal for the RTL world, even if it would have annoyed this particular person.

I note that his argument against automated flipping included the fact that you really need one for farsi, one for arabic, etc. Yet he only manually produces one. Maybe with the right tooling he'd have got to where he wanted to be faster.

A link to such a tool: https://github.com/MohammadYounes/rtlcss (note how it documents various solutions to the 'problems' listed in the original bug report, like changing the font stack when in RTL mode)

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#86

My concern with both of these is that I'm slapping classes on all of my UI everywhere. Why can't a button just get all of the bootstrap btn styles automatically? Why not have forms look right just by selecting the elements that make them up? This is a problem for Foundation too. Does anyone know why they have chosen to do this?

Both Bootstrap and Foundation support using their styles with SASS mixins, so you can create your own semantic classes, rather than slapping their classes on your markup.

See an example here: http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/layout/grid/#sass-mixins

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#87
post #50

I currently use Bootstrap, but have been looking at Bourbon recently along with it's suite of components (Neat, Bitters and Refills). It offers a nice set of mixins for semantic grids and common components. My only concern is working with other developers where Bootstrap is almost a common language.

Something I'm missing on Foundation and Bourbon[0] website is the self explanatory documentation. It is something that is very useful for me as I play around with Bootstrap, because I can find the section of functionality I need and then almost copy and paste their example code or inspect the element to understand it better. Did I just miss something obvious or does it not exist? [0]: http://bourbon.io/

There's a nice intro/tutorial here:

https://www.git-tower.com/learn/bourbon-neat-bitters/getting...

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#88
post #12

Wow an alpha version is recommended for production. What world are we living in?! :D I tested BS4 but the alpha tag makes me too nervous to use it in production. Things will break and some things are still not there yet (talking about navigation in bs4).

To be fair, using an alpha version in production isn't always that rare. I mean, back when I used forum scripts like vBulletin, people ran alphas and betas and release candidates on live sites all the time. Were there sometimes issues? Sure, but a lot of the time, they worked fine.

And that's not even getting into games and online services, where 'beta' never ends and you end up paying for alphas and early betas of things all the time.

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#89
post #12

Wow an alpha version is recommended for production. What world are we living in?! :D I tested BS4 but the alpha tag makes me too nervous to use it in production. Things will break and some things are still not there yet (talking about navigation in bs4).

Do you know where I can find a compiled version of bootstrap 4? I am on boostrap 3, but am about to roll out a site in a few weeks, so I might as well put 4 on if it's that stable.

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/tree/v4-dev/dist

There is a CSS and JS compiled version of the files there.

Re: State of Bootstrap 4 vs. Foundation

#90
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems fairly over-opinionated for the framework to declare every button as exactly the same. What if a developer needs one orange square button and one normal, greyish-silver boostrap button. If every class is automatically applied to each button, you're going to need to override the styling for that specific orange, square button.

Well yeah. The defaults should be defaults, and if you want to change them you override them. No?

And the defaults are provided by the browser, are they not?
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