Comment by Throwadev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Throwadev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You could already do that with 2.x too. I did this with a site that I built using bootstrap 2.3. No one knows that site is bootstrap until I tell them we used it. We made our own bootstrap.less file that only pulled in the .less for the modules we needed, so we could minimize the bloat.

Also, bootstrap uses normalize now, not reset. This poster should make a little more effort to understand before criticizing. It's obviously a useful framework as many find it very useful. Coding and html css for a complex is not something a developer wants to do unless they have very, very good expertise in front end development. I think bootstrap is great for developers who aren't front end experts, but aren't necessarily bad developers. Maybe specializing in back end work, database, web server side stuff. Using bootstrap frees you up to focus on things that matter more for your app, and you don't have to worry about typography, typeahead, grid systems, etc. It's one of many options that satisfy this need, such as Zurb's Foundation.

I use bootstrap. I'm disappointed with 2; although perhaps 3 is better.

I guess if you don't know css I can imagine it's a godsend: bunt frankly, basic css isn't that hard, and most of boostrap is easy to duplicate with basic css (except perhaps the media queries).

Anyhow, I don't think bootstrap doesn't have good stuff; I think the way it's presented as some kind of "system" is a bad idea. It's doesn't work well as a system. It works well as a basis when someone takes the time to pick and choose what they need.

You can't just take bootstrap AND some other css, use them both together, and expect both to work orthogonally without a lot of care. They will stomp on each others selectors and you'll have a specificity war on your hands. How can you make this work? By actually picking, the bits you need, and doing more than a modular concatenation with whatever other css you need.

Basically: it's a great css example, not an encapsulated, finished module.

When you say: "No one knows that site is bootstrap until I tell them we used it" that tells me you customized it, and that's exactly how it should be. It's not a reusable component, it's a customizable template.

I use bootstrap. I'm complaining based on experience, not randomly reading their code.

As to modularity: I'm happy they're addressing part of the problem, but it's really only part of the problem. Fundamentally, these "modules" are NOT modules: they don't provide and encapsulation layer since you still need to interact with them heavily. (unless you don't want to do any styling at all, ever.)

If you will, bootstrap is a set of templates, and it would work a lot better if they packaged it as such. It's not a library, nor a module: the insides of the abstractions leak out all over the place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com