Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework • Hacker News Board

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#81

Post by mattkevan » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

Vanderson wrote: post #73

cies wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mainly so that any web designer can jump in on the site and be productive with it, not just me. This is why I think CSS FWs (but also web FWs) are often preferred. At some point a large'ish team should be able to dive in to the project, get some shit done, and more on to other work. This get reeeealy hard without a high degree of standardization. FWs are primarily a means of standardization for me.

> At some point a large'ish team should be able to dive in to the project... FWs are primarily a means of standardization for me. I don't work with a large team internally, but externally I do. Every website built using my platform has potentially multiple people editing it. Also, wouldn't you consider long term support just as important as team size? As much I don't like other people's frameworks, the more common th…

This is exactly why Bootstrap is so useful. As it's so well used and known there's generally a solution out there for any weird problem you might have, and any developer can pick it up and be productive immediately.

Yes it's big, and to get the most from it you have to design for it from the start, rather than make it fit whatever the design is.

For a large web project I'm leading, we're using Bootstrap 4 with our own styling, but at every step from information architecture through to front-end we're using default components and variables wherever possible. It definitely makes things faster, more convenient and maintainable.

It's like using a well-known content management framework like Drupal instead of a home-brewed CMS built in Racket* or something. Drupal is boring, heavy and overkill for smaller websites, but it solves common problems for big websites really well, has a huge library of contributed code and is well understood by lots of people. The Racket site would probably be more fun, faster and cheaper, but a nightmare to maintain three years later when all the original team members have left.

* Not knocking Racket, I love Racket. Just picked it as an example of something more obscure than Drupal.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#82

Post by brunoc » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

subhajeet2107 wrote: post #43

pixard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone interested in this approach may also like Tailwind https://tailwindcss.com/

How is this different from inline styling ? this throws class inheritance out of the window

A lot of modern CSS frameworks choose to ignore the cascade.

This trend has grown in response to how difficult it is to avoid regressions at scale - large or multiple projects, lots of components, lots of independent teams, etc.

The cascade really is an elegant and efficient idea but it becomes really difficult to manage as projects grow.

The different with inline CSS is that those helpers are the building blocks — that’s where your standardize your design system metrics.

As others have pointed out this library provides a mechanism to abstract into components as well.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#83

Post by usermac » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

Dude, I appreciate your work.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#84

Post by zerkten » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #78

osdiab wrote: post #23

The more web development I’ve done the more I’ve swung back to just writing CSS myself rather than depending on CSS frameworks; I’ve ended up seeing these less as ways to accelerate development for a team that is skilled at frontend, but instead as a way for people who don’t like styling or have little experience in frontend development/low design sense to style things reasonably. But I keep seeing frontend framework…

While I share your sentiment about frameworks, I work in enterprise app development and I can't remember the last time I encountered someone else who had a firm grasp of CSS or even the Frameworks. Our organization adopted Bootstrap because it's a consistent and familiar framework and it takes less time for the inexperienced developers (most in my experience) to come up to speed on an app. When you have 20 developers…

Out of interest, would a firm grasp of CSS be a benefit, or merely neutral compared to other developer skills when you are recruiting?

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#85

Post by pbhjpbhj » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

trixn wrote: post #67

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

button is a tag, submit and disabled are tag attributes -- surely you don't need these classes, they're either superfluous or you're not doing semantic HTML.

I agree that you could in a lot of cases get along without these classes. But sometimes you want e.g. an anchor acting as a button in a web application. Or you want a button element with browser styles. You could argue that this is also already an anti-pattern but it does way less harm then leaking inline styles into the namespace and it is still semantic. Also this was just an example (maybe not the best one) to ill…

is selectable with

    [disabled] { }

or

    [disabled="disabled"] { }

And

    [disabled]:not(.greyButtonStyle) { }

does the last example if you classed that style, doesn't it? I've only done a little CSS, not very recent ... unless you're recruiting, then I'm an expert ;o).

I imagine though there are times when you want to class (some) button tags as .button.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#86

Post by mattkevan » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

badestrand wrote: post #61

chvid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to believe the same. Plus I have seen really complex and unfruitful css when a project starts customizing and extending ie Bootstrap.

I never understood how people could use bootstrap with custom designs. It gives you CSS and JS for so many elements and classes so if you want it your way then half your CSS is just undoing (like `margin-left: 0` or `font-size: inherit`) their styles.

If the decision is to use Bootstrap then you have to design with it rather than against it.

The defaults are pretty sensible, so as long as everyone - including the designers - understand they need to customise the design to Bootstrap rather than Bootstrap to the designs it works really well.

It' a fast way of working as Bootstrap has already done most of the basic stuff, and by making changes in the right places it's easily possible to not make it look like 'just another Bootstrap site'.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#87

Post by ckosidows » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #78

osdiab wrote: post #23

The more web development I’ve done the more I’ve swung back to just writing CSS myself rather than depending on CSS frameworks; I’ve ended up seeing these less as ways to accelerate development for a team that is skilled at frontend, but instead as a way for people who don’t like styling or have little experience in frontend development/low design sense to style things reasonably. But I keep seeing frontend framework…

While I share your sentiment about frameworks, I work in enterprise app development and I can't remember the last time I encountered someone else who had a firm grasp of CSS or even the Frameworks. Our organization adopted Bootstrap because it's a consistent and familiar framework and it takes less time for the inexperienced developers (most in my experience) to come up to speed on an app. When you have 20 developers…

I'm going to have to agree. Out of all the technologies my team had to juggle while I was on a web team, CSS and its various components (CSS precompilers, sass/scss/less, frameworks, etc) were the hardest to keep neat.

You don't _have_ to write CSS well to get it to work. People wouldn't follow naming conventions, wouldn't group common components near others... some people didn't understand CSS precedence and it could lead to incredible confusion, spaghetti code and extra work. Often people re-implemented functionality that was present elsewhere. And problems were exacerbated with sass.

From my perspective, tools that prevent people from writing additional CSS code will have a niche to fill for the foreseeable future.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#88

Post by epicide » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

zerkten wrote: post #84

cptskippy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your sentiment about frameworks, I work in enterprise app development and I can't remember the last time I encountered someone else who had a firm grasp of CSS or even the Frameworks. Our organization adopted Bootstrap because it's a consistent and familiar framework and it takes less time for the inexperienced developers (most in my experience) to come up to speed on an app. When you have 20 developers…

Out of interest, would a firm grasp of CSS be a benefit, or merely neutral compared to other developer skills when you are recruiting?

Not OP, but I'd say a willingness and proven ability to learn far outweigh any particular tools. Proving ability to learn does require past experience, of course.

I think it helps a lot more to show that you understand styling principles (reusability, selector precedence) than it does to be able to make pixel-perfect implementations based only on knowledge off the top of your head. [0]

That being said, in order to have that understanding, you probably need to have some experience with CSS or similar.

Basically, hands-on CSS experience is the means not the ends.

[0]: Perhaps all of this is what you meant by having a "firm grasp of CSS".

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#89

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

zerkten wrote: post #84

cptskippy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your sentiment about frameworks, I work in enterprise app development and I can't remember the last time I encountered someone else who had a firm grasp of CSS or even the Frameworks. Our organization adopted Bootstrap because it's a consistent and familiar framework and it takes less time for the inexperienced developers (most in my experience) to come up to speed on an app. When you have 20 developers…

Out of interest, would a firm grasp of CSS be a benefit, or merely neutral compared to other developer skills when you are recruiting?

It depends on where that developer was slotted in.

We currently have ~3 dedicated front end developers who have limited skills beyond HTML, CSS, and Javascript who maintain our large forward facing public presence.

The remainder of our developer pool are full stack developers who maintain a myriad of internal systems and apps used to run the business. A few of these apps are publicly accessible but they're niche and don't require strict adherence to brand or accessibility standards. The remainder are simply internal applications.

A firm grasp of CSS would seem to be essential to the front end devs, though I might be inclined to say it's not given some of the code I've seen. I am however willing to give them the benefit of doubt because I know they're a newer team that inherited an unfathomably large site running on an ancient CMS (Stellent) and the new products they're working on are integrated with some pretty heinous 3rd party platforms.

For the remainder of our Devs usability and appearance take a back seat to functionality. So CSS chops are more of a nice to have.

Re: Spectre.css – A Lightweight, Responsive and Modern CSS Framework

#90

Post by SnowingXIV » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

Confused why this is posted again, it's been submitted many times. (Maybe there was a big release? Just looks like updated docs). Having said that, I've used this for a number of projects and enjoyed it much more than heavier solutions.

There is no js so you just write your own in and it's really easy to mold to your own liking. It was "just" enough and produced polished looking crud apps. Mostly search and form stuff with tables but users have enjoyed it so I give the author credit. I also had to spend way more time working on the backend and this did not get in the way.