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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

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.

> bootstrap is not composeable

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

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.

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.

>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.

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...

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

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.

> 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...

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.

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