Hey guys - I'm one of the core developers of Pure. Happy to answer your questions. We officially haven't launched yet, but glad that you guys are checking it out.
I'll think about how to expose this more. Right now, it's buried within Customize and Extend.
Bootstrap is a large framework for application development, but perhaps you want to hand-roll most of the visual components. Bootstrap isn't very well suited to this, as it is so extensive that building from the ground up (instead of "extending") is a bit difficult to do. Sure, you can modify some of its parts and pieces fairly easily using the variables, etc, but in general, Bootstrap is Bootstrap. Pure, as it mentions on the page, builds on Normalize and gives you some much more basic pieces to work with. I would imagine this would be used by a lot of people who are doing less "app"-like experiences, and are instead leaning more towards layout-driven, brand-heavy "website"-like experiences.
'Consider pure-g to be a row or "grid", and pure-u-- to be columns, or "units"'
First, I'm not a fan of the "pure-" prefix. If I were to use your system I'd use it exclusively. An option to either specify or ditch the prefixes would be lovely.
Second, in that sentence you say "consider pure-g to be a row". Why not just call it a row? I understand Bootstrap has used that already, but there's no copyright and it's a convention everyone is used to.
The default prefix is there for maintainability. It's a pain to grep for "grid", "row", or "g" when you need to change something. But if you don't like it, you can build your own.
I don't think Pure is big enough to warrant this, but Bootstrap sure could use it.
By appearances this is part of YUI. What's the relationship between this project and YUI3? Will this be taking the place of YUI's css grid system? What's Yahoo's involvement in the project (stupid question, maybe, but I'm not so familiar with YUI and am curious about at what level the project is controlled by Yahoo, and to what extent its progress is community-driven)?
This particular project looks a lot like a fork of the CSS components of YUI. We'll have to see what direction it takes.
- Pure is not a part of the YUI Library itself, but works well with it. (See http://yeti.cx for another example of this kind of peer project built by our team.)
- Our main project, YUI Library, has a well-defined Contributor Model that makes it clear that it's a community project, not just an open-sourced chunk of code reserved for Yahoos to work on. While there isn't one adapted to Pure yet, reading YUI Library's Model will give you an idea about what kind of community involvement our team desires:
"[YUI Library] is a meritocratic, consensus-based community project. Anyone with an interest in the project can join the community, contribute to the project design and participate in technical decisions. This document describes how that participation takes place and how to set about earning merit within the project community."
https://github.com/yui/yui3/wiki/Contributor-Model
A discussion list and model for Pure is being setup.
In that context, Pure looks great, congratulations.
IMO the goal of these frameworks should be to enable the use of most common design patterns, while normalizing across browsers and enabling responsive design.
We used to write our own JS for these patterns (tabs, navigation etc) and then JQuery made that easier. Now these frameworks are going one step further and giving us these patterns ready-to-go. My only suggestion would be to ensure that the most common design patterns are handled by your framework.
(Based on my experience, a suggestion that would be nice to have. For reference, its the design pattern behind the menu system that Wordpress uses: a nice "menu" list as a sidebar, like on your site, that allows flyouts or accordion style behavior.)
It feels like a CSS toolkit to build "flat designs", where Bootstrap forces a ton of gradients, shadows, and bevels in a lot of its base styles. Of course, you could build something of your own with less-flat design using this toolkit, which is what makes it so nice.
Pure is less than 15kb minified (< 5kb minified + gzipped). It's meant to be a starting point for your application's styles, taking care of all the hard stuff, like aligning forms, making buttons look consistent, having a common CSS base, etc. From here on, you can write your own application styles to make your app look pretty.
In the end, you end up using a lot less CSS to achieve a similar effect. in the end, they are different products. You can use Bootstrap and Pure together too (see the Extend page for an example).