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Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

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Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#51

Post by mau »

egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

A framework is not only a good way to start. It's also a good way to uniform code, make things easier for new comers (larger projects usually have lots of new people that eventually write code), solve multiple common issues you'd fight by your own (e.g. browsers compatibility), community support and documentation. If you write your own you need to document well all things and things very careful how to arrange css classes to make code reusable and flexible.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#52

Post by stevo111 »

egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

I immeditely giving this a fail for not namespacing|prefixing css classes. I mean "error" class, "warning" class - FTFY seriously guys? Yeah - noone else gonna have a splendid idea for using those exact names anywhere ever.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#53

Post by cnp »

egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

Code normalization: that's the key. Once you've got everything working everywhere via a base scaffold -- the hard part -- then you can very quickly iterate on design changes, or design in general. Bootstrap et al are generally quite easy to tweak once you understand how all of the components fit, and i'm sorry but CSS just isn't fun to have to write from scratch, especially on bigger projects.

IMO, if I were to arrive on a new project and saw the front-end devs reinventing the wheel, it would immediately set off a red flag.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#54

Post by collyw »

egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

OK, and where do I start? How do I make a pretty blue border around a text input to subtly indicate focus? What's the best gradient / padding to use in such circumstances? What fade in time will looks good? There are so many questions I could ask just about the text input highlighting.

As a back end developer who needs to do bits and pieces of front end stuff, I can see this taking me months (at least) to learn JavaScript CSS, and design to make something as anywhere close to bootstrap. Or I could just use what they have done (and thousands have tested) and save myself a whole lot of effort. And if you have other developers joining the team, at least they will be familiar with whatever framework you are using, rather than some in house crap that someone wrote ages ago, and has now left the company.

I have not looked at the source code for Bootstrap, but if it was crap I assume there would be a ton of articles ranting about like there are for PHP.

So (with Bootstrap at least) I am getting pre-written, tested, understood code, documented code, probably of at least "reasonable" quality, with a community online to help with problems. Does you own code have that? I certainly don't have time to write that stuff myself .

The more experienced I get as a developer, the less code I try to write. People with the "code everything yourself" attitude remind me of when I was fresh out of university, and didn't realise how incompetent I was at the time.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#55

Post by joshvm »

franciscop wrote: post #2

I've tried to keep it as tiny as possible with just under 3kb when gzipped. What would you change? What would you add? Any feedback or pull request is greatly welcome! MIT Licensed

The checkbox bugs me, it's not in line with the radio buttons and it's very slightly smaller. I'd make it square, but that's a personal preference.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#57

Post by egoodberry »

purringmeow wrote: post #50
egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

Some of us like that you get cross-browser and device tested code that is super easy to use. You can choose what parts of Bootstrap to include in your app, so you don't bloat it. Would you elaborate what you mean by fighting? Bootstrap is extremely simple to customize and I am no front-end guru.

In my experience, the fighting comes in when the designer (who generally has less understanding of the Bootstrap modules' intended roles) extends an existing UI concept that came out of the box. This is a perfectly reasonable ask on their part- it's a component on our site, why shouldn't we be able to customize it?

A specific example: Bootstrap expects dropdowns to be unordered lists with anchors as the top-level element, so having a fixed-position header as the first item while its children scroll is difficult. If this has been our CSS based on our markup, it would've taken fifteen minutes, because we could have gone in and done a bit of basic surgery on our module, making it more flexible. (This may not be the best example, but that's the general idea.)

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#58

Post by egoodberry »

cnp wrote: post #53
egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

Code normalization: that's the key. Once you've got everything working everywhere via a base scaffold -- the hard part -- then you can very quickly iterate on design changes, or design in general. Bootstrap et al are generally quite easy to tweak once you understand how all of the components fit, and i'm sorry but CSS just isn't fun to have to write from scratch, especially on bigger projects. IMO, if I were to arriv…

"i'm sorry but CSS just isn't fun to have to write from scratch"

That may be your problem. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I especially enjoy this type of work.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#59

Post by egoodberry »

collyw wrote: post #54
egoodberry wrote: post #40

An even lighter-weight alternative: forgetting about CSS "frameworks" altogether. Aside from propping up prototypes really quickly (an exercise made trivial with these help of these little style collections) I just don't understand why anyone would want them in a real app. I've spent hours upon hours fighting the likes of Bootstrap and its copycats. And to what end?

OK, and where do I start? How do I make a pretty blue border around a text input to subtly indicate focus? What's the best gradient / padding to use in such circumstances? What fade in time will looks good? There are so many questions I could ask just about the text input highlighting. As a back end developer who needs to do bits and pieces of front end stuff, I can see this taking me months (at least) to learn JavaS…

If you're designing sites yourself, I completely agree with you. I haven't much of an eye for design myself and always rely on foundational CSS to take care of these kinds of decisions when I build pet projects; however, I've always worked on teams that have designers who hand me high-fidelity mocks (or at least high-level style guides) that answer these questions. The implementation itself is simple enough once you've worked with CSS long enough.

Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative

#60

Post by collyw »

egoodberry wrote: post #59
collyw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, and where do I start? How do I make a pretty blue border around a text input to subtly indicate focus? What's the best gradient / padding to use in such circumstances? What fade in time will looks good? There are so many questions I could ask just about the text input highlighting. As a back end developer who needs to do bits and pieces of front end stuff, I can see this taking me months (at least) to learn JavaS…

If you're designing sites yourself, I completely agree with you. I haven't much of an eye for design myself and always rely on foundational CSS to take care of these kinds of decisions when I build pet projects; however, I've always worked on teams that have designers who hand me high-fidelity mocks (or at least high-level style guides) that answer these questions. The implementation itself is simple enough once you'…

I think you have answered your own question there then:

simple enough once you've worked with CSS long enough

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