Front-End CSS Frameworks | Hacker News Reader

Front-End CSS Frameworks

usablica.github.com

95 pointsafshinmeh45 comments

What does "Free" mean in the context of licenses? Looking at a few of those it appears that some don't actually specify, which is dangerous:

"Because I did not explicitly indicate a license, I declared an implicit copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically assert copyright at any time and demand that people stop using my code."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...

There's a couple flavors of Creative Commons licenses too, which work well for artwork and media, but are terrible for source code.

After 6 month joy and pain, I finally give up using Bootstrap.

It's very obvious that smart people are using BS to build cool site like khanacademy, it's well designed, and it's one of the best CSS framework you can find. But...

But for a CSS beginner like me, it's a bit too magical, I wasted a lot of time debugging, I wished I could conquer the complexity, so I tried for 6 months, and now I give up with regret.

Bootstrap(or maybe I should say CSS frameworks) is slowing down my development for the past 6 month or so, if you are a front-end newbie, be warned!

I think I am going through the same troubles as you.

What' the alternative? Foundation?

I am going to learn bootsrap because at this point it is the coin of the realm - inspiring other frameworks pros/cons and the # of addons and modifications is just growing too rapidly to ignore.

I actually prefer Foundation to Bootstrap

As above in my reply to the parent, if you've got a few minutes available to discuss the troubles you had, I'd love to hear from you.

If you have a few spare minutes of time, I'd be really interested to hear more detail about this - what problems you faced, what you felt was unclear, and what you felt was complex. My email's in my profile if you'd be willing to discuss.

CSS frameworks should be speeding up development, not slowing them down so if there's something we can do to make them more accessible, we should find out what that is!

Thx for your attention.

I think I am now easily annoyed when people trying to hide complexity from me, and their creature does not work out of the box. Which makes it really hard to fix bugs. And just think how cumbersome it is to overwrite all the variables to get a new navbar look!

So now I think I prefer some https://github.com/styleguide/css stuff, plus some really easy to use widgets with good design taste stuff.

No more hide and find games, I am tired!

Just adding my voice to earlier requests for you to expand on your experiences with Bootstrap. I am more of a database developer and have never mastered CSS. I can hack it, thats about it. My initial thoughts were that Bootstrap is going to solve my lack of front-end programming skills.

there's also Susy, which builds on sass and compass: http://susy.oddbird.net/

Nice, we could add it also. Seems a useful responsive framework.

In contrast to Bootstrap and many other CSS frameworks we tested, Susy really enables you to write semantic, non-bloated HTML which can be strictly independent of the CSS you throw at it.

THIS. I think Bootstrap is great for prototyping & back-end admin UIs that a developer might slap together without a designer, but the sheer number of sites that take user-facing sites to production w/ Bootstrap is disconcerting.

Great list. I really appreciate the graphic used to distinguish platform support (responsive vs not). Much easier on the eyes than a written list of supported screen sizes for each framework.

Would it also be useful to list the underlying language used for each framework (plain CSS, LESS, Stylus, etc) in case you plan on customizing?

Preprocessor information is absolutely necessary.

High-level, vague descriptions are not.

Instead, I'd have some indicators of maturity, complexity and such - year introduced, version number, lines of code, documentation quality (okay, the last one is subjective.)

Actively developed/maintained or not?

Author name?

Cool. The grid could give a little more information, though, like last version, if widgets are included and other stuff I can't think of. You could also make the column headers sortable; useful if the list gets longer.

Yup, good idea.

I'm throwing in:

Frameless - http://framelessgrid.com/ and

OpenDAWS - http://wail.es/opendaws/ (disclosure - mine)

Different way of thinking about grids

Awesome thanks for this. Only thing I could recommend would be an extra column for any processor :)

You're welcome buddy. A new column for what?

I believe he means preprocessors like Sass, Less, or Stylus.

Whoops sorry, I did mean preprocessor as the other person guessed. I assume I was auto-corrected first time around and didn't notice.

I would definitely add http://roots.cx/ to the list.

Whoo! Agreed. A little less 'vanilla css-y' than the other ones here, but there are a bunch of people using it regularly at this point : )

Looks nice! It's great that they didn't just write another grid system but used one that was already working.

Great. We'll add it so.

Nice Work Man ;) it's better when using current version + languages & technologies behind them (with icon i mean) By the way: (Damet Garm :D)

Mokhlesim :D Yup, good idea. Let's make it better together! Fork it: https://github.com/usablica/front-end-frameworks

http://cssgrid.net/ is a pretty good responsive framework as well.

Sure you can add it to the list by forking the repository in Github.

may want to add http://groundwork.sidereel.com/

So cool, It's could be one of table items.

I was just going to mention this. I know it got released a few days ago on HN.

http://gumbyframework.com/

Good news, could you create a pull request on Github?

Should add more context. What makes each one the best?

It's so hard to tell which one is the best, we provide information and comparison table about frameworks and users can choose the best one.

no inuit.css, no upvote :)

Sorry, what you mean by inuit.css?

I assume http://inuitcss.com/. At least that's the first hit when I search for "inuit.css."

So which one do you use?

I wish I could see the description of each frameworks without the hoverover. That's rather unnecessary.

I know. It's incredibly annoying when people "design" without regard for the UX.

Oh, thanks - I had no idea you could do this. (I browse with my keyboard the majority of the time.)

The same information, minus design, is in the project's GitHub readme.

https://github.com/usablica/front-end-frameworks

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