As a CSS (experienced writer), Bootstrap is fucking bonkers

As an engineer, if it has achieved front-endian popularity, I am inherently skeptical of it. Bootstrap is one of many examples of how I came to have this tendency.

What's wrong with bootstrap?

@HitWRight It goes against the conventionally right way of styling- NOT inlined, in a seperate file/module.
If I'm replace style="position: relative; background-color: grey" with class="p-relative bg-grey", then whats the point?

@HitWRight
It is fundamentally flawed, before even broaching it's broader plugin/dependency spectrum.

CSS exists to apply presentational behavior to elements without any structural imposition. It is decoupled by nature.

Bootstrap demands specific elemental structure for the purposes of applying canned behavior. It is strongly coupled by design.

This is the equivalent of driving a nail with the claw end of a hammer. A skilled enough hand can make it work, but it will never be quite as good as using the hammer properly. Most people will simply make a mess of it and not really care one way or the other.

My experience with Bootstrap is this:

Is the customer in question asking for a particular style i.e a designer provided a spec and needs to be custom made? Then forget bootstrap.

The customer forces one to use bootstrap for whateverfucking reason and write on top of it? Tell the customer to choke on chode.

Is it an intranet app that will only be used by said customer that will not face the outside world and who cares what it looks like as long as it looks good? then bootstrap it is.

I can be cute with css for hours on end, or slap that bad boy in (bootstrap), throw it out and call it a day.

@SortOfTested I have a hard time trying to visualize how we could push presentational behavior to elements without structural imposition e.g If a navbar needs to be styled as a nav bar, then the presentation will be fixed to said representation of a navbar. Same for certain images etc.

CSS (presentational styling)is meant to be tightly coupled with structural composition (HTML).

And then there's me: easy to use and understand, does what it should do.

Only thing I dislike about Bootstrap is it's dependency on Jquery...

@FinlayDaG33k have you tried bulma?
I use skeleton for small things, like when I just need text formatting, responsiveness and tables.

If I need more fancy things, I go with bulma.

@mundo03 I have tried Bulma and Tailwind (I actually use Tailwind for my monthly website analytics report) but idk... I just prefer Bootstrap since that's what I'm used to really :\

@FinlayDaG33k i started with bootstrap, but really git tired of it's looks and colors, and I was so lazy that instead of personalizing it, I just started looking for alternatives

To be fair, I don't fo a lot of front end, so a framework with low learning curve was what I wanted.
Skeleton is my go to, and I use bulma if I need something that requieres javascript to work.

@mundo03 Yea, I started with bootstrap, and even after a long time of experimenting, I just stuck with it.

The looks and colors aren't that big of a deal to me since I just customize it if need be (like I did on my website: https://www.finlaydag33k.nl/)

I do a decent bit of everything so :p

@FinlayDaG33k visited your site on mobile, I like it!
You should also link your modified bootstrap in the nerdy stuff, just for giggles.

Client: We need Bootstrap

Me: No

Client: We need Bootstrap

Me: Fine

*Installs Bootstrap, uses the .container class and literally fucking nothing else.

There you fuck.

@mundo03 In all honesty, I have paid 0 attention to mobile users so however good or bad that looks is coincidence xD

My Bootstrap "modifications" are actually overrides that are part of my website's CSS: https://gitlab.com/FinlayDaG33k/...

Then, using PurgeCSS, I just remove any unused CSS from my bundles.

You can read more about those optimizations here if you're interested.

https://reddit.com/r/FinlayDaG33k/...

This is the shit I like to do with my websites, find way to optimize it more and more and more.

My website is now about ~334KiB for the entire first load, I've seen websites with single CSS files as big as that...

Still looking into ways for more optimization tho.