While Bootstrap is "great" it really needs a viable competitor. There's a tons of things that could be done better.

The competitor must be really nice looking by default, responsive, use Stylus/Sass not LESS, and be modular. There isn't one today, but I hope there will be one in 2013.

I've been using https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass as a SASS version of Bootstrap. It's a nice project, with native support for Compass, so no Rails dependency. ( https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass#compass )

Zurb Foundation seems to be what you are looking for. It uses SASS and actually predates bootstrap and is being actively maintained. Its a great alternative. http://foundation.zurb.com

It does use Sass, but was released after Bootstrap.

Bootstrap came out of Zurb, Mark worked with them and learned everything, and then when he went to Twitter he re-used a bunch of zurb to create the first version of bootstrap.

Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4588053

Do you realize you are replying to the Mark you're referencing in your comment?

Zurb Foundation. (http://foundation.zurb.com)

Thanks for posting this. I have never heard of ZURB Foundation before, but it looks like exactly what I need for an upcoming project. Thanks again!

> use Stylus/Sass not LESS

I really like LESS. What am I missing out on?

The thing that finally pushed me off LESS was animations, and the contortions necessary to get to something even approximating DRY for some concepts.

I think it might be a result of trying to be "better CSS" instead of "a language for generating CSS".

Say you wanted to delay a slide-in-right animation for 50ms per list item. (So item 1 slides in immediately, item 2 50ms later, item 3 50ms later, etc.)

For that portion, this is what the LESS looks like:

  -animation-delay(@delay) { animation-delay: @delay; ...vendor prefixes... }
  .delay-child-animations {
    &:nth-child(2n){ .animation-delay: 50ms;  }
    &:nth-child(3n){ .animation-delay: 100ms;  }
    &:nth-child(4n){ .animation-delay: 150ms;  }
    ... more things here ...
  }

In SASS, we could do something like

  @mixin delay-child-animations($max-children: 20) {
    @for $i from 1 to $max-children {
      &:nth-child(#{$i}n){ .animation-delay: ($i - 1)*50ms;
    }
  }

References:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8294400/css-animations-wi... http://radiatingstar.com/css-keyframes-animations-with-less

"Sass is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that's cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing."

http://css-tricks.com/sass-vs-less/

Compass (which was built on top of Sass) does sprite sheet generation and cache busting. It's also shipped with a bunch of pre-defined CSS3 mixins.

Sass also allows you to put media queries inside your rule blocks. (In the future, this will be also possible in regular CSS.)

Fwiw, here's why Bootstrap uses LESS instead Stylus/Sass:

http://www.quora.com/Bootstrap-front-end-framework/Why-did-T...

I too want to know this.

What about Zurb Foundation?

Indeed: http://foundation.zurb.com/

Zurb is definitely the way to go. It is a great product.

I really liked Foundation framework. It is responsive by default, now it my first choice for public facing site. Bootstrap I use mainly for for admin interface.

And perhaps focused on the semantic web instead of presentation? A guy here turned me on to the idea, although I'm not sure I yet completely understand how it would go from the abstract to the concrete.

   Assets (illustrations and examples) are now retina-ready.

Too bad this is for the documentation pages only and doesn't include bundled icons. :(

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons

Bootstrap was going to ditch Glyphicons (and IE7 support) with 2.2.2[1] but it looks like they're either holding off on that or they changed their mind. I recommend using Font Awesome[2] instead of Glyphicons.

[1] http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/11/09/glyphicons-font/

[2] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

We use fontawesome as well, it makes your site look much nicer.

You can also use http://retinajs.com/ to scale stuff up if you want.

Even better, pack your own custom glyphs from icomoon.io.

Excellent. Can't wait for 3.0

When will there be another update on the repository move!

Later this week.