Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think Bootstrap works really well in exactly one role: "utility" interfaces. Your admin dashboard. You 'settings' UI. Your business back-office application.

Anything where you need functionality, not flashiness.

This is because it allows application developers to do just that - work on the application. They have pre-built components to use, that look reasonable and fit together, without needing a dedicated front-end developer to constantly futz with templates or a static version of the app when management asks for an extra form field.

View on HN

So many internal IT departments don't have the luxury of a designer, so Bootstrap is great for them. All of our internal tools were old-school, table-based layouts and slowly they're making their way to Bootstrap because the pure coders there can implement it easily for all the boring dashboards and intranet level things.

Right, I also don't think it can be underestimated the useful power of Bootstrap's documentation: it is very well put together in terms of being a largely well organized palette of options with copy and paste code directly beneath living examples. It's much easier to point non-front-end developers and junior developers at Bootstrap's documentation and tell them "find what you need and use that" than with many of the alternatives.

Admittedly semantic classnames are nice to haves, but they become a vocabulary you have to teach others, whereas Bootstrap has built a useful enough shared vocabulary and strong enough documentation on it that it is rather reliable across the spectrum of developer skill level and familiarity.

Exactly. As someone who has spent a lot of time writing intranet sites as a one man army (with more strength in application development than design), Bootstrap has been a godsend for me.

If you don't need flashiness, why use bootstrap at all? All this complicated CSS with its inevitable namespace pollution, what problem does it solve exactly, and is that really a problem that needs to be solved?

bootstrap provides a solid design and layout grid that's easy to use for a pure developer. Fonts, colors, margins all just work. Alerts are properly aligned, forms are laid out in a clear and concise way.

That's all problems that need solving for pure utility interfaces and bootstrap is very solid at solving those, especially if you don't care that your utility interface looks like "just another bootstrap site".

My current project for a client has dozens of pretty basic CRUD screens and a few slightly more complex screens. Its reasonable to look at, and scales to a mobile device, including a side navigation bar that slides in/out on small screens.

I wrote about 10-20 lines of CSS.

Even though it's expressly an "admin" UI for the app (which has no public web UI) they would not accept an app made with no stylesheet and just a page of form elements. It would be practically unusable without any CSS, and the time it would take me to write the CSS for just the navigation bar OR just the pagination system OR just the reasonable form layout on multiple screen sizes, dwarfs the amount of time it takes me to download bootstrap and copy the dist folder.

For a public facing website - I think bootstrap is terrible, and I'd rather see something like Bourbon used, where semantic markup is then styled.

This isn't about that. It's about getting a usable interface that takes almost zero time to implement.

Same here, also, I would like to add out that we in generally tend to use Bootstrap only for internal admin interfaces, not for the ones that out end-client would see, though.

Even then, those are prototypes that get replaced by more adequate things eventually. Not to mention, in many situations I would actually write better (as in more robust and more maintainable) solutions than Bootstrap with less CSS and mark-up funk, but that might stem from my misuse or insufficient knowledge of how to use bootstrap.

Oh agreed, Bootstrap and concise markup are pretty much mutually exclusive, but for admin/business functionality apps I don't think that's a huge issue.

Another factor I'm considering is that a packaged/sold product(s) that use Bootstrap for the UI means that someone purchasing/using the product(s) can make use of a "bootstrap theme" to apply a new basic appearance (fonts, colour scheme, possibly icon set, spacings, etc) pretty much just by loading in a new theme.css file

Admin interfaces still need to be usable and look good. Bootstrap takes care of all that for you.

It just doesn't matter if they all look the same, which is what happens if you use Bootstrap out of the box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com