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Comment by nauticacom | Hacker News Reader

Frameworks like this are nice if a) you want your site to look exactly like every other site which uses this framework (rare) and b) every use of an element is for the exact same purpose (also rare).

I suppose if you're throwing together some hacky admin page that 2 people are going to use in a year, it makes sense. Otherwise I don't see why you don't just design your site.

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> I suppose if you're throwing together some hacky admin page that 2 people are going to use in a year

I have to build a _lot_ of those across all sorts of contracts that I do.

Libraries like Pico CSS and htmx [0] let me do this incredibly rapidly, with it looking fine and working great, while keeping the maintenance burden low for the future

[0] https://htmx.org/

You do want one site to look like another site. I know if is fun for designers to make up their own UI's, but there are well established patterns that work well, and that's what everyone should use. This is how everything was when people built desktop applications because you used the OS supplied widgets. These widgets were built be experts in HCI. Everything worked the same in every app, and nobody thought about it or wished they were all unique. CSS and the web are the worst things that ever happened to usability.

> it's fun for designers to make up their own UIs

It's not just "fun," it's necessary to create an optimal user experience for every particular use-case. Have you ever played two video games which have the same UI? I'd be surprised if you have. Each and every one has its own interaction patterns, its own design language, and its own visual hierarchy.

I absolutely want the web to have better builtin widgets with common functionality and accessibility, but the point is not for them to look the same, but rather work the same.

I mean, yeah - sometimes you just gotta get some work done.

I’d say most of the time.

I don't know what kind of stuff you all work on, but for the kind of things I work on if the interface isn't specifically designed and laid out after doing user research on the problem space, the whole project is a no-go, and is certainly not "getting work done."

I don’t quite follow you.

If you use a framework and it looks like a bunch of other sites that use the same framework, the framework isn't the reason that happened.

Any boring, generic framework site is usually only one absolute-positioned div away from being super unique... :-)

Just tweak the styling of buttons/inputs, that's the main "tell" that a site is using Bootstrap.

I don’t know why people who are worried that a site might look like another site worry about that when we’re talking about a css framework.

Generally that includes looking consistent to some extent.

As a user, I happen to like when different sites have familiar UIs. Why do I need to learn completely new controls for every single "web app" from AWS to Gmail to my company's internal systems.

I already know how to use a select element, why style it so I think it's a text field? I already know how to use a button, why style it like a link? I already expect certain features to look and work a certain way, why burden me with learning it all over again?

a) you want your site to look exactly like every other site which uses this framework (rare)

You can customise it https://picocss.com/docs/#customization

b) every use of an element is for the exact same purpose (also rare)

Styling is done by combinations of elements. Consistency between those combinations is good design.

It appears to offer a reasonable opportunity of customization [0]. Of course, you may end up messing it and losing some of the consistency.

[0] https://picocss.com/docs/#customization

It’s pretty customizable. I’d argue that changing from default colors, fonts and spacing results in a very different aesthetic. With pico, this is easy to do with a handful of css variables - so you don’t even need a pre/post-processor.

To be fair, bootstrap and other classful frameworks look pretty similar to each other too, unless a skillful designer creates their own theme, at which point you might as well do it with frameworks like Pico.

> Frameworks like this are nice if a) you want your site to look exactly like every other site which uses this framework (rare)

I might be an odd duck, but I would love it if most sites looked the same. I'm also one of those that loved interfacing with apps that used windows 98 templates and interface wise functioned the same instead of reinventing everything differently.

90% of times I'm visiting a site or opening an app, it's because I want to interact with its data or functionality. The more it adheres to my assumptions and pattern recognition, the better.

No, I'm not a robot, but I get my creative side tickled elsewhere.

I think you're confusing look with function. Two things need not look the same to "adhere to assumptions and pattern recognition," but rather need to function the same and have the same underlying conceptual language. If the web had better builtin widgets (combo boxes, dialogs, etc.), then you'd get this benefit, but because everybody is reinventing everything with JS, every site feels different.

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