Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea of why this is happening, I will investigate further
I'm reasonably sure this is because of the light grey check hover effect you have. I can reproduce on Nexus 7/Chrome in exactly the same way. I get the same effect on my laptop by leaving the cursor over the checkbox after unchecking - although then it's obvious because I've already seen the hover state. My guess is mobile Chrome is using the hover effect to denote selected - which I guess kinda makes sense. I'd prob…
Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#72An 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…
The thing is, if you actually designed web UIs professionally and didn't rely on these toolkits, you could immediately make a reasonable first guess at all of those things and you'd be doing it in the context of your specific project. The total time to refine everything over the entire development cycle might be a few minutes, and most of that would be cross-browser testing, which obviously for professional work you should be doing even if you're using a toolkit.
I've nothing against toolkits. They can be useful for quick prototypes. They do a competent basic job for in-house tools written by people who aren't front-end developers and just need something that works. But for high-end UI work? I have never written a major professional project that still used any of these toolkits in the final production code.
Most toolkits aren't sufficiently reliable that you can trust them without testing, so you've still got one of the biggest and most tedious jobs to do whether you use one or not.
Often attention to detail is lacking in significant areas. Using a big name toolkit is no guarantee of quality; many of them have absolute howlers on their own demo pages that are immediately obvious in at least one major browser, often just in the visuals before you even start interacting.
But more than any of that, for real projects, you're often going to have branding requirements that will mean extensive customisation. All those default colour and typography schemes aren't worth much. And some all-things-to-all-people toolkit that works great if you use its defaults might be hiding all kinds of limitations if you're not using a flat design, or if your layout requirements are more demanding than "simple responsive grid", or if you want something that works right on mobile or supports proper keyboard navigation or meets accessibility requirements or...
Toolkits are great for basic work, and for a lot of projects that really is all you need, but you don't design a Rolls Royce by picking wheels and bodywork from a catalogue.
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.
Code everything myself? Unlikely. Code things myself when quality matters and off-the-shelf isn't good enough? Always.
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#73I tried using Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks and (as mentioned in the comments) I felt like I was fighting the frameworks to get it to do what I wanted to do. The problem with CSS frameworks is that they are invasive when it comes to writing semantic HTML. As someone who is working on developing semantic HTML and improving the skill, its annoying when you use a CSS framework which it encourages you to perform inl…
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#74Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#75I tried using Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks and (as mentioned in the comments) I felt like I was fighting the frameworks to get it to do what I wanted to do. The problem with CSS frameworks is that they are invasive when it comes to writing semantic HTML. As someone who is working on developing semantic HTML and improving the skill, its annoying when you use a CSS framework which it encourages you to perform inl…
I think you'd like the bourbon framework, which is basically a way to structure your css and doesn't get in your way. See their grid framework: http://neat.bourbon.io/ and their default style package akin to bootstrap: http://refills.bourbon.io/
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#76Honestly for most "real" projects, I just use the Bootstrap LESS source files for the normalizer, grid etc. and just compile my own UI components. I believe that for any app to be unique, it has to have its own visual style and when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself. Don't get me wrong, I love these frameworks. I just think they're good for quick…
A fresh and engaging UI with groundbreaking ideas and techniques could possibly win you lots of fans but for the vast majority of applications (especially lob or ent) this does not make sense.
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#77I tried this kind of selectors for styling and I don't like it. I can explain why with a question : What if you want a button that looks like a like and a link that looks like a button. In your case you will have to overwrite "button" selector, which is with very high specificiy and to override the main selector styles. button.link { color: white; border: 0; background: none... } and then copy the relevant for only a…
While it's true that sometimes you want a link to act as a button ( Looks like button ), I cannot think of the case when you want a button to look like a link. May I ask, in what situation did you encounter this? I still think this is way too specific (I have never had to do something like that). Picnic lets buttons be buttons, and links be links OR buttons, just buttons cannot be links. I think in this way you can a…
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#78Honestly for most "real" projects, I just use the Bootstrap LESS source files for the normalizer, grid etc. and just compile my own UI components. I believe that for any app to be unique, it has to have its own visual style and when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself. Don't get me wrong, I love these frameworks. I just think they're good for quick…
If a person isn't able to very easily customize Bootstrap with a minimal amount of CSS, I wonder if they're able to competently create their own front-end framework that works perfectly in every browser on every platform.
As someone who navigates the web primarily with a keyboard, sites that use Bootstrap tend to be more usable than sites that use front-end frameworks that were built from scratch. For example, in my experience, most designers and developers don't use :focus selectors when using :hover selectors because they only think about mouse-based navigation.
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#79Honestly for most "real" projects, I just use the Bootstrap LESS source files for the normalizer, grid etc. and just compile my own UI components. I believe that for any app to be unique, it has to have its own visual style and when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself. Don't get me wrong, I love these frameworks. I just think they're good for quick…
I am still waiting for a customer to tell me they don't like my application because it uses a common UI framework. Not holding my breath. Tech people care about this, but only barely and only very few. A fresh and engaging UI with groundbreaking ideas and techniques could possibly win you lots of fans but for the vast majority of applications (especially lob or ent) this does not make sense.
Re: Show HN: Picnic.css, a lightweight Bootstrap alternative
#80Honestly for most "real" projects, I just use the Bootstrap LESS source files for the normalizer, grid etc. and just compile my own UI components. I believe that for any app to be unique, it has to have its own visual style and when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself. Don't get me wrong, I love these frameworks. I just think they're good for quick…
> compile my own UI components [...] when you use the whole of Bootstrap (or just about any other framework) you just can't differentiate yourself. If a person isn't able to very easily customize Bootstrap with a minimal amount of CSS, I wonder if they're able to competently create their own front-end framework that works perfectly in every browser on every platform. As someone who navigates the web primarily with a…
I evaluated Picnic CSS just now, and it doesn't use :focus selectors. This is what I'm talking about.
In my experience, usually when developers release a solution (e.g., a framework) that's advertised as a lightweight alternative to Solution X, the lightweight alternative isn't really an alternative for developers who understand why Solution X isn't lightweight.