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Comment by alexvr | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if I like this at all. I think they need to call it

Bootstrap 3: flat and fat!

It just seems like a huge step back to me. It's not even an elegant "flat" design; it's like they scrapped everything and decided to make all classes (even buttons for God's sake) DIVs of different colors. The new navbar, for example, is literally a gray DIV with rounded edges. I use Bootstrap on my web app because I care about design, but I don't care so much about learning fancy CSS; Bootstrap takes care of making things look subtly 3D, shaded, animated, etc., and that's what I'm looking for. I can make flat DIVs myself, thank you very much.

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>I can make flat DIVs myself, thank you very much.

What about the scaffolding, the grid system and sane typographic rhythm? What about the glyphicons and out of the box mobile awesomeness?

Bootstrap is more than 3D buttons and box shadows, perhaps they are moving away from that to focus on the utilities that make the framework great, and not for the shiny buttons.

You're right, but I never use the grid stuff anyway; I only want to invest time in learning about something if it's not framework/vendor-locked, so to speak, so I'd rather just use the elements and do the scaffolding myself.

Glyphicons are probably my favorite part, though.

If you literally only want the buttons, then you should use something like this: http://blog.koalite.com/bbg/ to create the css for your buttons and avoid a whole lot of overhead including the entire framework's css just to get the buttons.

Good to know. I'm seriously considering some ways to cut down on the overhead, so this is great.

The more people stop using Bootstrap as a complete design the happier I will be.

What would you suggest they use? Why does your happiness depend on this?

Use bootstrap, but customize the design to fit your brand. Bootstrap is a framework for building your own CSS on top of. The less opinionated it becomes, the better, since it'll make it easier to adapt the framework for your design.

This is the key to Bootstrap (or similar css frameworks). It's not intended to be a theme. If you want to just have the css/html ready for you to do some documentation or a project that has no need for any visual differentiation, then go ahead and use vanilla.

When used to build something that should be visibly unique, the visual design and appeal is something that should be created aside from bootstrap, maybe with the grid in mind, and delivered as mockups or pattern guides.

Come on yes it is (was) intended to be a theme , that's why it is so successfull. Grid frameworks existed well before bootstrap , and most developers did not use them.

Grid frameworks like 960gs never became as popular as Bootstrap because Boostrap is as much about formatting content (including forms and UI elements) as it is about the responsive grid layout.

I suppose you could say it comes with a theme, but anyone who cares enough to complain about the theme should also be motivated enough to customize it.

Not everyone is a HTML/CSS hacker. It's a really valuable front-end framework. My app wouldn't look nearly as professional without it.

It's OK for the first iterations, but if you really care about your product, you should hire a HTML/CSS hacker.

Yeah, but I'm a broke high school senior (1-man team), so I'm sort of forced to take advantage of free stuff like Bootstrap and the free year of Amazon EC2.

Bootstrap is definitely useful if you're just tinkering - it makes a minimum viable product look sort of legit ;)

But I would certainly invest in specialized developers to make a lighter-weight, in-house UI if I were really serious about a website.

If you really care about your customers instead of your product, and they are more than happy with the "professional" Bootstrap UI, you have no reason to mess with it.

What is always good to have is a designer or at least a developer with an eye for aesthetics, to use the Bootstrap elements in an elegant way. Otherwise, what would you "hack" about HTML/CSS? Either reimplementing Bootstrap, or playing with the latest and greatest that won't work in anything else but the latest Chrome (see the IE6/7 discussion).

Would you rather see something that looks like these? Because this is what you would get instead: http://www.gnu.org/ http://gcc.gnu.org/ http://clang.llvm.org/

There is something I keep pointing out when inevitably the conversation turns this way: Bootstrap (and Foundation) are UI widget libraries, not just prototyping helpers. They are the missing rich widget set that browsers should provide by default if they were proper application runtimes and not the patched together mess they have grown into. A good comparison would be Sencha ExtJS, but for markup instead of full JavaScript: you have layout elements (the grid), a set of reusable controls, and some helpers (typography, etc).

A lot of web applications -- line-of-business but also consumer-oriented -- should NOT be visibly unique, and styling your own buttons not only is a big waste of time, but also reduces usability. Look at the WinForms/Cocoa/GTK environments to see the value of a single visual language in action (including their respective UI guides that help with a consistent experience). The popularity of Bootstrap tells you the need is still there -- for both the millions of developers who need to get the job done without reinventing too many wheels on top of broken hypertext, and for the users who appreciate not having to figure out a UI for the millionth time (just ask your boss/customer what they think of your boring Bootstrap app, they probably love it).

>I care about design, but I don't care so much about learning fancy CSS

might just be me, but I don't think you care too much about design if you rely on standard bootstrap for style. Not that I don't understand the appeal of having something that looks good out of the box.

Well, I suppose I'm a lazy aesthete.

> The new navbar, for example, is literally a gray DIV with rounded edges

Maybe the motivation behind this change is to make the navbar look a bit less twitter-y out of the box?

According to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5351887, the flatness is temporary.

> I use Bootstrap on my web app because I care about design, but I don't care so much about learning fancy CSS

A paradox.

That's what bootstrap themes are for, if you are not good in CSS yourself, you can easily install a custom theme on top of it.

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