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Comment by olouv | Hacker News Reader

I've been a big fan of bootstrap, but I find that these CSS frameworks are becoming more and more irrelevant in the age of widespread flexbox support. CSS modules do put the last nail in the coffin.

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I don't find this to be the case. There are a ton of conventions in Bootstrap, an obvious one being its variables, that are very useful when working in a team, and (in our experience) with outside contractors. I couldn't imagine giving up Bootstrap simply 'because flexbox'.

Also flexbox support in IE is still terrible, so for those of us building sites for the open-web it's a non-starter for things where a 'just doesn't work' fallback is unacceptable, such as the main site structure and alignment of core elements.

Currently I only find flexbox useful for things like vertical centering, where it's not the end of the world if the element doesn't center in IE.

By variables do you just mean the CSS pre-processors? My reason for asking is that it's not unique to Bootstrap at all (and, if they just use the default build, many designers will never even see them).

Yes, and I didn't claim they were unique. My comment was in response to a post about flexbox making all CSS frameworks redundant.

I disagree. Flexbox is a little buggy in IE11(and IE10 with auto-preifxer and the old spec) for almost everything it's fine, you just need to remember to set widths on column layouts, which is just one extra line.

Not to say it isn't frustrating, especially since it works extremely well in Edge but MS said they won't port the fixes over.

Yes, flexbox is not supported in IE8 & 9, wrong spec in 10 and buggy in 11, therefore the 'terrible'. I'm talking in the context of websites that have to work on the open-web (where unfortunately a lot of people still use those versions of IE).

For contrast if you work against a framework like Bootstrap 3, sites 'just work' all the way back to IE8.

What about a CSS framework based on flexbox? http://bulma.io

I do like what I see, though Flexbox makes most of it so trivial that the benefits of adding it as a dependency seem limited.

I've taken to using CSS frameworks as reference guides for solving certain problems, I tend to not use them directly.

Unless I'm missing something, its grid doesn't really match the capabilities of Bootstrap's. Only one breakpoint for a start?

If you think about the grid-systems of those CSS frameworks, you're probably right.

But Bootstrap has a nice "out-of-the-box" experience. I know much about usability engineering and user experience, but not so much about graphic design. And bootstrap fills this hole for me. Getting something out fast that doesn't look like 1999

I believe Foundation has Flexbox support as well: http://foundation.zurb.com/sites/docs/flexbox.html

also see http://leejordan.github.io/reflex/docs/

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