It's only 12K minified and it includes everything you've come to expect from Bootstrap (that's now 120K minified). As a bonus, you get full _IE7_ support for all your friendly third world enterprise customers -- and no worries about responsive design because that's not supported at all!
I think things like this (Shoelace) are a great learning experience for the developer(s) in question or for fun throwaway stuff. You could make an argument for them for a team project where there's wide agreement, but for anything I will need to maintain or share with someone or hand off I pretty much only use Bootstrap as a starting point. Saves a lot of headaches down the line.
Don't know how big it is but it's very small and it's based on LESS so you can pick and match what you really need.
Used it with pretty good success since I like to roll my own (sorry!) and Bootstrap and others was a little to much Batteries Included.
Don't really agree with that as Bootstrap is also modular, especially if you use it from Sass or LESS source, which IMO is the 'right way' to use it.
(You can also make a customised build at http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ if you want to pick and choose modules but don't use a preprocessor like Sass/LESS).
TL;DR – most people just use the bundle because they don't want to setup a preprocessor.
> It's incredibly easy to set up
Yeah, once you've spent a few hours reading up on the latest docs. That's like me saying saying to you "Building a customized linux kernel for any hardware is incredibly easy with Yocto Project"
https://github.com/joe-watkins/gulp-sass-starter/blob/master...
Although you're correct, I meant in a professional environment. Id be quite surprised if I caught one of my devs not using a preprocessor.
For enthusiasts, most really do load the entire bundle via CDN. For Bootstrap 4-alpha6, that's 192KB of CSS and another 47KB of JavaScript.
They just copy and paste and override the raw CSS. Many don't even know what a preprocessor is, much less how to set one up. Now they don't have to.
But I never said this project wasn't bleeding edge. It will only become more relevant as browsers evolve :)
BTW - Shoelace is only 7.9KB min/gzipped.
I think this is a great illustration of the fact that, although some people intend to be derisive in their speech, we shouldn't assume that any designation whatsoever is intended as derision. That is, everybody needs to chill and assume the other person is making a good-faith attempt to be reasonably polite until proven otherwise.