I'm not a programmer nor have I ever taken any HTML/CSS classes. The last time I learned HTML/CSS was back in 2000 when WebMonkey was still popular.

Thanks to Bootstrap, I've managed to build some very professional looking websites, coded entirely from scratch, all with my existing HTML/CSS knowledge.

Just a phenomenally useful framework for non-coders like myself.

It's also phenomenally useful for non designers too. I mean okay, is it the most pretty framework? Of course not.

But it's got a consistent look and feel to all components, and that look is a mile above anything I could design from scratch.

So in the same way you use it to build professional looking websites with limited HTML/CSS knowledge, I use it to build sites with very limited design knowledge and no sense of aesthetics.

Absolutely. I'm a backend/infrastructure guy and spent a lot of time creating internal tools with web interfaces over the past 3 years. Thanks to Bootstrap, they look decent, modern, took very little time and people were happy to use them. Sure, not the most original designs, but that's light years ahead of crappy interfaces I'd have produced otherwise.

Some engineers like to complain about 'yet another bootstrap template' a lot, and I can understand that it gets a bit dull and boring, but that's much better than the alternatives.

I had been using bootstrap for a while until I found http://bulma.io now I can't stand bootstrap.

Still bootstrap has been amazing over the years.

Bulma's hoverable dropdown menus don't seem to be accessible via keyboard navigation. One of the nice things about Bootstrap is that the developers have closed more than 15,000 issues, and in the process, have addressed many edge cases that other CSS frameworks haven't.

That's a fair point (issues closed) and is actually pointed out on their comparison to Bootstrap page: http://bulma.io/alternative-to-bootstrap/

They're going to have to drop all their flexbox language once Bootstrap 4 leaves beta.

I've been watching bulma and it's definitely promising. Would you care to elaborate what are the things that you "can't stand" with bootstrap ?

After having used bootstrap for so long, I understand it's strengths & shortcomings quite well. I feel there's little to complain with bootstrap, and little to gain by ditching it. Would love to be proved wrong.

Unless you're using bootstrap components as-in-the-examples in the same context and elements, they work fine. But try using them somewhere, like an input or button in a table cell, or card in a grid, etc - and you'll spend an eternity of "unsetting".

Basically bootstrap is not composeable. It provides not just a set of styles - but also a severely restricted visual design. People quickly run into elements that bootstrap was just not designed to be placed into. That's why there are so many forks/extensions of bootstrap, like bootstrap-admin and so on.

So its good to start with and follow the official style guide. But doing anything more, and the restrictions immediately bubble up. And then you quickly run into an entirely different set of problems on organizing your own CSS, like using SASS, BEM, etc.

Its not a question of OOCSS vs BEM, but more of how tolerant/accomodative the framework is in using it in different elements and contexts. Bootstrap's tolerance is relatively low compared to most other frameworks.

How is Bulma different in that regard?

BS4's modules and components are highly portable and work in pretty much any context. I don't see how offering a theme customization tool results in a "severely restricted visual design", it allows the freedom to make any visual design you want. BS4 is MUCH more than visuals/UI.

> bootstrap is not composeable

Definitely share that pain. Is there a mature framework that solves it ?

It's hard to explain. I've used it for many projects in the past and currently use it at work.

For creating a quick and dirty project it's great. But after a while you find you end up using less and less of bootstrap because moulding it to your requirements becomes a burden. That's prob why you rarely see big complex sites using it.

There's nothing worse than using react or angular and then someone pulls in a library to have a bootstrap control that breaks stuff and doesn't work and is hard to style. Spend hours trying to get it working properly beyond the most basic implementation of the control.

I prefer bulma because it focuses more on the basics and doesn't get in the way. Even after you create stuff you can shape and mould t easily.

I found interesting the architecture of Google material design components, I still didn't try but I wonder if could solve those kind of problems that you mention.

>"bootstrap control that breaks stuff"

I like the idea of adapter more than having a separated framework like react-material design or react-bootrap.

https://material.io/components/web/docs/architecture-overvie...

>That's prob why you rarely see big complex sites using it.

What? Lyft, NASA, FIFA? Is there a list of major sites that are using Bulma? By your appeal to the bandwagon this makes it an inferior framework?

A basic grid and some buttons are nice for a pet site, it doesn't appear to be a robust enough framework for any site of significant size. I guess I could write the CSS and JS for a modal from scratch, or I could just install Bootstrap and never think about it again.

Bulma is severly limited compared to BS4, lacking many major components (I don't even think there are any JS components) and all the best parts are almost identical to BS, in same cases with identical naming. There is no tool to customize your theme, like BS has.

I can take the BS source, comment out half of it and end up with Bulma. If I started with Bulma, I'd have to write lots of code to end up with a framework that rivals BS.

No Javascript is great. Bootstrap requires jquery, some making some events really hard to manage with react or angular. And react/angular bootstrap libraries are restrictive that it makes it hard to extend features of bootstrap.

All these issues go away with bulma.

No tool to customise theme is great. I don't want a bootstrap looking theme. It gets in the way... bootstrap is structure and styling throwing in the kitchen sink and half the house but not adding any doors or windows and you can't hide a builder to add more without it costing a kidney.

>No Javascript is great

Then don't use the JS parts of BS?

>No tool to customise theme is great. I don't want a bootstrap looking theme.

These sentences are contradictory. The tool allows you to make a theme that doesn't look like everyone else's. Bulma does not have this option. You will end up with a "Bulma-looking" theme.

>It gets in the way

Unlike Bulma's visual styling? If you don't want a default-looking theme, wouldn't you need to customize it then? Doesn't lacking any tools to do so make this harder? I don't understand this argument.

Sometimes styling bootstrap is Super frustrating.

Same with foundation and semantic UI. Bulma and other small libraries are much more flexible in this regard.

There are other toolkits for bootstrap that don't use the jquery based JS.. you can use anything, as long as the rendering uses the correct classes for a given state, etc.

That's a feature and reason for using smaller libruaries because if you only need some pieces why include everything.

I find full frameworks like bootstrap or quasar to be nicer to deal with.

Looks good. I'm going to try bulma for my next project

Why do you prefer bulma?

Bulma, and others like it (Milligram is my favourite) have enough functionality to get going: responsive layout/grid, typography, form styling) but they don't have a huge, heavy set of components and requirements like Bootstrap.

I think people really au fait with CSS prefer to add only what they need rather than serve Bootstrap entirely.

> but they don't have a huge, heavy set of components and requirements like Bootstrap.

But that's all optional, Bootstrap is modular [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/customize/

[2] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass/blob/master/assets/st...

[3] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v3-dev/less/bootstrap...

> but they don't have a huge, heavy set of components and requirements like Bootstrap

That's a drawback. For BS3 or 4 I can just comment out what I don't need. If I do need many of the components and JS modules that Bootstrap provides OOTB, I have to write them myself. I'm using a CSS framework to avoid doing that.

I've just started using Bulma with Angular. I don't need or want any javascript, but a pure CSS framework, which Bulma is.

Edit: And can be easily customized.

It is bloat. Until you meet a CSS preprocessor.

https://github.com/kbariotis/kostasbariotis.com/blob/master/...

I can just include what I need and override what I want.

Agreed, it's been my preferred way to use BS for a long while, first with less, then scss... You can leave a lot behind, and with react/angular there are ui components that don't require all of jQuery.

This.

For me, the bloat isn't as big a problem as the fact the 3.x is unmaintained and has at least one known security vulnerability.

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/20184#issuecomment-...

That’s as much a vulnerability as <script> letting me pipe user input to it. Should I? Of course not. Can I? Yes. Is it a flawed feature for this reason? No.

Calling that a security vulnerability is quite the stretch.

I am not sure how an XSS vulnerability is considered a stretch. Perhaps the likelihood of it is low. Is that what you meant?

That still doesn't address the overall point, which is that Bootstrap 3 is no longer maintained, according to its project Owner, and this or any future vulnerabilities may or may not be patched. That seems like a significant risk to me.

It's not an XSS vulnerability in Bootstrap for the same reasons

  <div class="row"> UNESCAPED USER INPUT </div>

or

   <img src="UNESCAPED USER INPUT">

aren't - escaping user input is up to the developer, not Bootstrap. Being essentially a static HTML/CSS framework with a bit of well-tested optional JS, Bootstrap's attack surface is minimal, making future vulnerabilities a pretty unlikely situation. A quick perusal of Github's issues search for "security" finds nothing significant in the past.

I will echo this person: "This was found in an application where data-target was based on user input and only passed through standard HTML entities encoding. There is no reason why data-target should interpret HTML so while not impacting many applications it should be fixed in my opinion."

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/20184#issuecomment-...

Echoing a wrong statement doesn't make it any less wrong.

If you don't want XSS, don't echo untrusted raw user input to the browser. Not in the title tag, not in a paragraph body, not in a data attribute. It's on you, or your application framework. Expecting Bootstrap to combat it is insane.

<3

Accessibility is another benefit from using Bootstrap. From someone who "hated" bootstrap in the past, this feature is the most significant for me.