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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

Man, I feel weird. I used BS2 temporarily, but then stripped it out for a straight reset and grid system. Old habits die hard, I guess, and what I Want from a UI doesn't always match Bootstraps ideas... I'll give this another shot for my startup prototype, but I have a feeling the same will happen.

Is anyone else like that, or am I now old-school at the ripe age of 22?

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I have no use for it myself. If I need a simple Bootstrap design, I can just copy some of the elements in plain old CSS and have a much simpler setup. If I need something complicated, Bootstrap is limiting - you end up rewriting it all anyhow.

And the idea of keeping up with Bootstrap versions is just plain crazy to me.

To each his own, I suppose.

Maybe Foundation would suit you better. I heard it's a bit more lightweight than BS.

I checked it out for that reason. Then I found a number of social images and began wondering why a lightweight CSS framework needed images for facebook, twitter, etc...

You mean the Social Icons in the Add-ons section? You don't need to include those, in fact, I believe they are opt-in, not opt-out.

Just checked and you are correct.

If you want something lightweight, I wouldn't go for Foundation either. Even after stripping out the unnecessary stuff, I found it overly obnoxious to style.

I ended up with the Skeleton framework after struggling with both Bootstrap and Foundation for a few days. It was a much better decision. I've also been eyeing Bourbon Neat lately as well.

Which reset and grid system do you use? I have the same experience, and I end up un-checking every option except one or two on bootstrap's customization page for most of my projects.

I used it at my startup, but there's absolutely no reason for me to upgrade to BS3. I think bootstrap is great for giving people a quick framework to build off of, when writing up a grid system doesn't make sense. For our next major release, I think we're going to migrate away from BS entirely. I'd rather control it all in house than play catchup with their releases. For me, it's not even the UI but the ability to control exactly what we're doing.

Maybe you aren't the target audience? Maybe you need something else entirely?

Possibly, but others I respect use it for the same things I tried too. Possibly an issue with me, rather than the framework, of course.

I agree that it can bloat, and often customizing components takes as long as simply starting from scratch. However, I really like LESS, and bootstrap is full of some great less utilities. Customizing bootstraps less is a perfect example of why I love it, and how it saves me time

At the ripe age of 22, you'll like undergo a number of pivots in your career between embracing frameworks and tossing them out. There is no right answer; sometimes they help, and sometimes they hurt. We can't always predict what the right level of abstraction will be for future problems; today's popular frameworks can either become tomorrow's cruft-laden disasters or its stone-age embarrassments. Likewise, the definition of minimalist changes with the times (see jQuery), and minimalism itself goes into and out of fashion.

I happen to like Bootstrap, because I've seen a lot of projects descend into mess and cruft due to poor maintenance; it takes effort to maintain clean conventions, and if a framework dictates those conventions to me, that's one less set of decisions that I and my team have to make. But Bootstrap feels undeniably heavy, and perhaps I'll regret its use later. But for now it makes me faster, and I choose it knowing I'm making a tradeoff.

If you're just using it for the minimal things, then you might look at the highly underrated Skeleton (http://getskeleton.com). It's got a reset, grid, forms and typography, but all are fairly minimalist, easy to override, etc.

I'd recommend Foundation as an alternative too, but that one's already been suggested. It's also very good, but slightly heavier-weight than Skeleton.

is this still being developed? there hasn't been a new version out in more than a year

Fine question. It still works perfectly either way. As it stands, its minimalism doesn't need a whole lot of maintenance, but it may not be actively maintained any more.

Check out the forks for more recent activity.

https://github.com/dmur/Skeleton https://github.com/nickpack/Ribs

You should also take a look at Pure[1]. It's a series of minimal components to help you get started.

[1] http://purecss.io/

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