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Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

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Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#61

Post by erikpukinskis »

I like Bootstrap for the same reason I like Ember. I can just throw some fairly complex HTML, interaction etc in there and it works well. Then, as I need to customize things, add more complex styles and interactions, I can do that. But I don't have to. It means I can hack together a prototype that gives the impression of the complete app within a single day, and start doing usability testing day two.

I just opened up the app I've been working on for the last 6 weeks, which uses Bootstrap, but really a lot of it is customized. So I wondered whether I could just pull out Bootstrap.

And looking through it, there's really not much of Bootstrap left. But then I'm poking around and there's a dialog box with an attached suffix. And that's not something I really want to fiddle with right now, so having one that Just Works is great.

Of course I could poke around on the web and maybe find some purpose-built HTML that does that task. But with Bootstrap I know that there's a wide range of stuff that works across browsers, and I can just throw it in.

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#62

Post by lmm »

sgdesign wrote: post #3

That's really impressive, if accurate. If so many people are using Bootstrap as a default style, it makes me wonder if maybe the default way browser style HTML element shouldn't be closer to what Bootstrap does?

It should be. Unfortunately the web has been taken over by designers who want to be able to control every pixel, and browser makers are too eager to please them to change any defaults. So we get monstrosities like html5, which just adds more and more things to html without any attempt to rationalize and remove the bits that turned out to be a mistake.

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#63

Post by Oculus »

christiangenco wrote: post #51

There are several comments here about why using Bootstrap is bad, primarily because it limits the workflow and freedom of the designer, and includes too much stuff you don't need. But that's entirely the point of Bootstrap. It's not something that's supposed to be used by designers. It's perfectly tailored for someone like me: a back/middleware developer who sucks at design, but has enough sense to know that when I t…

This 1000 times. I'd also add that the majority of the public doesn't notice Bootstrap, but just sees a decently designed website (i.e. Your not going to lose mainstream consumers by using Bootstrap, might actually gain some compared to self-designing).

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#65

Post by saryant »

jmathai wrote: post #57
christiangenco wrote: post #51

There are several comments here about why using Bootstrap is bad, primarily because it limits the workflow and freedom of the designer, and includes too much stuff you don't need. But that's entirely the point of Bootstrap. It's not something that's supposed to be used by designers. It's perfectly tailored for someone like me: a back/middleware developer who sucks at design, but has enough sense to know that when I t…

I'd argue that it's a great tool for companies that have paid designers on staff too. What it provides us is a consistent and predicable framework to lay out pages. Anyone can contribute because it's becoming a well known/understood tool to work with. I doubt that more than 1% of websites need such unique designs that Bootstrap is too limiting.

A company I used to work for did exactly that. Our in-house graphic designer took Bootstrap and customized the living snot out of it. We (the devs) could work from the standard Bootstrap docs but the end product looked nothing like stock Bootstrap.

Not only does it give both devs and designers a point of reference for communication, it makes it much easier to ramp up new devs since they don't need to learn the idioms of our style sheets.

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#66

Post by Brajeshwar »

enra wrote: post #56
Brajeshwar wrote: post #47

Bootstrap, Foundation and every other general purpose frameworks are good. Pretty good for non-designers, actually. However, if you're a designer these framework are more of a harsh load of excess baggage that drags down the design. I have used Bootstrap for quite a few designs and so also with foundation and many other multitude of frameworks. I even did tried my hands on starting off my own grid framework. However,…

Or: 1. Use Bootstrap 2. Customize it Has worked for me on https://kippt.com & https://sendtoinc.com without dragging down the design

Ah! I missed a point. The way I do, helps me pick and choose only the modules that I need to use from the vendor frameworks.

For instance, for a simpler website which would be OK with just a grid but not all the other modules of Foundation, I can just pick up the grid. btw, Foundation's new medium grid, "grid-5.scss" is nice one.

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#67

Post by markdotto »

cheald wrote: post #53

Mashable's current design is based on Bootstrap. You wouldn't know it to look at it, though - we used bootstrap-sass, ripped out the pieces we didn't need, replaced others as the design called for it, while still getting the benefits of the scaffolding. When you treat Bootstrap as a foundation rather than the entire presentational layer for an application, it's really quite good. Unfortunately, many people throw Boot…

Super interesting—I did not realize that :). If you guys ever want to pass along feedback on how that went and what you did, please do! <3

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#68

Post by cheald »

markdotto wrote: post #67
cheald wrote: post #53

Mashable's current design is based on Bootstrap. You wouldn't know it to look at it, though - we used bootstrap-sass, ripped out the pieces we didn't need, replaced others as the design called for it, while still getting the benefits of the scaffolding. When you treat Bootstrap as a foundation rather than the entire presentational layer for an application, it's really quite good. Unfortunately, many people throw Boot…

Super interesting—I did not realize that :). If you guys ever want to pass along feedback on how that went and what you did, please do! <3

We keep meaning to do a writeup on the build process, but so far have been way too busy to get to it. :)

Re: Twitter Bootstrap Now Powering 1% of The Web

#70

Post by erlend_sh »

adamseabrook wrote: post #17
northwest wrote: post #16

It is encouraging to see that the world (both developers and "consumers") "invests" in open source projects. It means our resources are allocated in the most intelligent way.

I know it is not quantifiable but the effectively free marketing and goodwill that Twitter get from open sourcing Bootstrap must be worth many millions.

That "get" will quickly become a "got", as they've finally moved away from github.com/twitter to their own independent github.com/twbs repository, as was the plan for a long time: http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/09/29/onward/
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