For those who want to get a site up with good defaults, typography, and widgets, Bootstrap is a huge timesaver. If you have a better framework for those of us who "can't design" then point us in the right direction.
>I guess the answer really is "if you don't want to or can't design your site, just use twitters design"
That is what you are describing, so go right ahead and use boostrap. I was just trying to figure out if there was something more to it, given that it calls itself a "framework" and minor releases of it get posted here for some reason. Those things made me think perhaps I was missing something, and it wasn't just "here's a copy of our design you can use".
I think that answers your question to "how is this a framework" and "what is the value in this?"
For many startups who want to get a site up quickly and have it look good and work well on a large number of sites, using something like bootstrap as the basis for their site design is a huge win.
In your previous posts you keep mentioning "designers", plural. What if started your own firm and didn't have money for "designers", plural, but wanted a site that looked good? Code all that CSS bugger yourself and test it across all those browser versions and different display sizes? Or would you maybe look for a solid, easily customized solution that is built around design and coding best practices and that is tested by an active community?
Do you code your own OS kernel and device drivers as well?
What's a good value for the ratio between your base font size and the lineheight you use? Hmm? A decent approximation is already used in the LESS code for bootstrap.
How do you implement a clean grid system that works across browsers and resolutions? How many grid implementations have you tested? Implemented? How reliable are they? How well do they work?
Are you hand coding your CSS? Bootstrap is probably what helped most of the people on HN realize the value of CSS preprocessors such as LESS.
Instead of spending a load of time optimizing common UI experiences across lots of browsers, or hiring a consulting designer who will probably reuse the code he's already written and charge you a chunk of change, you can instead use bootstrap. And when there is a point release you will find that they often included lots of little optimizations that make the overall CSS work better and across more browsers.
Frameworks provide templates and take care of the boilerplate for you. Bootstrap isn't any different from any other framework in that regard.
>In your previous posts you keep mentioning "designers", plural
Yeah, one at a time. I've been doing it for 16 years, I have worked with dozens of designers over that time. I don't have some sort of stable of dozens of designers to choose from or anything.
>Or would you maybe look for a solid, easily customized solution that is built around design and coding best practices and that is tested by an active community?
Bootstrap is not built around best practices at all, it actively forces you into anti-patterns that best practice is to avoid.
>Do you code your own OS kernel and device drivers as well?
If I were being paid to develop an OS, I certainly would.
>How do you implement a clean grid system that works across browsers and resolutions?
I don't. Grids are entirely unnecessary, and are bad web design. All my sites work fine across browsers, across devices, across resolutions and DPIs, with javascript disabled/unsupported, in screen readers, etc. Note that I've never seen a boostrap site that accomplishes that. Most break on trivial, obvious stuff.
>Are you hand coding your CSS?
Our SCSS, yes.
>or hiring a consulting designer who will probably reuse the code he's already written
Bingo! Where are all these people coming from that haven't already solved this problem a decade ago?
>you can instead use bootstrap
This is all that anyone needed to say. Everyone insisted on trying to fight about this, instead of simply giving me an honest answer: "its just a default design you can use in case you didn't already have one". Given that the answer is so simple, it is amazing how many people just wanted to fight about bootstrap for no reason.
> Given that the answer is so simple, it is amazing how many people just wanted to fight about bootstrap for no reason.
You may want to review your original posting and the follow ups that mention your tone.
You say that Grids are unnecessary and bad web design. Given that that is pretty much the opposite of what most practicing graphic designers think is the case, I think it'd be helpful if you could follow up with a few links, articles, examples or data points to back up what you are saying.
>Given that that is pretty much the opposite of what most practicing graphic designers think is the case
Sorry, I assumed HN of all places wasn't stuck in 1996. What do graphic designers have to do with anything? We're talking about web design. What web design experts think is relevant. What is good for laying out a newspaper or magazine is not necessarily what is best for delivering web content.
So another way to look at it is having re-usable components that you can choose to include/exclude as needed. Then use LESS to customize, tweak, extend those components as needed to create the custom design you need. https://wrapbootstrap.com/ has some examples of work done in this area.
For those who want to get a site up with good defaults, typography, and widgets, Bootstrap is a huge timesaver. If you have a better framework for those of us who "can't design" then point us in the right direction.