Comment by chris_engel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_engel | Hacker News Reader

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I really hate to rant. I love the idea of this and worked on a thing like a "fb bootstrap" By myself for quite a while now.

Having done many fb apps and making heavy use of twitter bootstrap by myself for other projects recently (oh god, app development on lightspeed!) i first looked at it thrilled: hey cool- this will come in handy! But after about 5 seconds: wtf?

This is just twitterbootstrap painted blue. Using this for your facebook apps would NOT give them a genuine facebook look but make them only look cheap.

The typo is not right. Font sizes, line spacing - everything. Forget about the columns. They are twitterstyle, not facebook. Buttons? They are grey and blue, yes - but not facebook style. Tables? Not at all. I could continue this list for every single element! Facebook has unique tabs, unique breadcumbs. Completely missing!

My quick advice for getting a nearly facebook-like style in your appe in seconds: embed their CSS in your header. When you investigate a bit how they build their page elements, you can mimic their style really quick.

And for the "fb bootstrap": nice idea. Awful implementation. Stay away from it. But everyone has to decide for himself - seems like most people like it, tough.

Hi Chris, do you think you could extract and share your knowledge and stylesheets the way that FB Bootstrap does?

If I manage to spend 1-2 days on cleaning up and documenting my framework (be warned, it's PHP based) I will open a github project and post it here on HN.

Php newbie factoid: every single php programmer I know ends up developing a framework of their own.

Why does this happen (appearently) more on PHP than other languages? (please correct me if I'm statistically wrong)

Maybe because it's easier than learning an existing one? I don't know.

The reason why I created my facebook framework: there simply is no other.

I think you're being too critical and you're at risk of coming off as a know-it-all here. On the whole you're right in your criticisms but I think you're taking too narrow of a view of this.

First off, it's close enough. Close enough is more than enough for something like this as Facebook has rules about looking too much like the rest of the site. Having it be close but not quite Facebook-style is great for plausible deniability if they ever gave you a problem and you were inclined to try to defend yourself (it may be a losing battle but at least you have the option).

The author makes it clear that it's based on Twitter's bootstrap so it's not surprising to see it just "painted blue" as you say. Honestly, I looked at this and saw that it was more than enough to get you started.

Whenever you create a boilerplate, especially one that you release to the public, you walk a fine line between offering a solid, customizable foundation and giving people far too much structure that they have to undo. Every single framework I've ever seen (even the one I made for myself) has been criticized for being pretty much a completed project sans content. It's almost a losing battle. Give people too much and they complain it's no longer a boilerplate. Give them too little and they say there's not enough for it to be useful. I think this project walks that line quite nicely.

So I guess what I'm saying is give the guy a break. This is cool and useful. It doesn't look cheap either. I think you went too far with that statement. It isn't totally Facebook style but close enough goes a long way. I absolutely am not trying to be antagonistic. Everyome has the right to criticize especially since this got posted here on HN. I don't want to say you can't criticize but just be fair about it. It isn't as bad as you make it out to be. To me it's not bad at all. Though it may be bad to you, which is okay, don't you think there's at least some good things about it? I don't know, I have this weird paternal instinct that kicks in whenever I see criticism I think is too harsh.

The point is: download twitter bootstrap, open the variables.less file, tweak some colors to blue and grey and thats it. There is nothing what makes this a "facebook bootstrap" of any kind - and that's what I was saying.

update

It seems like the guy is still working on it - so maybe it just became popular too quickly before its ready. On a second look, the dialogs look much better now.

And as I sayed in my original post: everyone has to decide for himself ;)

PS: If facebook ever thinks you have done wrong, there will be no chance for "plausible deniability" because they simply delete your content and will never contact you or answer your mails. So why don't be perfect in the first place?

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