Bootstrap 3 RC2
blog.getbootstrap.com
blog.getbootstrap.com
On a different note: I am a big fan of Bootstrap. Yes, there are tons of complaints from users about sites "looking like Bootstrap", but that's hardly a fault of the framework (at least they look passable). I've always found that some button customisation (easier in 3.0), changing the navbar (color, height, dropdowns) and tweaking the forms is the easiest path to getting a site that doesn't look like vanilla framework. And none of those things require much work or expertise: heck, just a change in height, a different nav-bar font + color go a long way as it is.
And glad to hear you're a fan! <3
With that said, I've been using the 2.x releases on multiple projects over the past year. Thanks for all of your hard work!
I am surprised by some of the inclusions such as overhauled grid system to include four tiers instead of the original three of RC1.
To change something so fundamental does seem more like a beta feature than RC1 and no doubt people who've built 2x to 3x converters will be a little more anxious now.
That said I'm sympathetic to the fact that if you're going to change fundamentals or pivot, now's the time. Looking forward to more releases and feature stability.
These aren't complaints by users. These are complaints by developers and designers who often feel a little...perhaps...threatened by bootstrap and things like it.
Okay, I guess it could be users if you cater to those groups, but for the overwhelming majority of cases users don't know and don't care. They find a clean, modern-looking site that offers the functionality and information that they need, and that's all they really care about.
The complaints probably are from devs and designers, but that doesn't mean users like Bootstrap. Devs and designers complain because we know enough to recognize, and complain about, the source of all the monotonous websites coming out these days.
Source of bad design? No. Source of bad taste? No. Source of monotony? Yes, just out of convenience.
Why should every web application look different?
If it was up to me, the browser default styles would be something closer to Bootstrap (and actually implement stuff like the <menu> element), so you can build a decent looking site with touching CSS at all.
That's a remnant of the past and it's changing quickly. Look at any consumer app developed and released in the past year. Most have custom elements, layouts, etc. The web just did it first and is further along in the "designification."
Native apps all looked the same because they were all designed, built, and used by largely engineers. As computing (both usage and development) becomes less esoteric and more powerful, design will naturally become more expressive and purpose-built. This trend extends back to DOS as well and applies well outside of computing (cars, buildings, clothing, hardware, etc).
To the devs who feel threatened, I am referring to people who currently sit on a large bulk of custom, in-house code that has been often rendered redundant, if not obsolete, by projects like Bootstrap. I would contest that all front-end devs use Bootstrap or something similar, as the overwhelming majority of devs work on projects with very long lifecycles, quite unlike the common HN manifestation of short-cycle apps.
Your thoughts?
Bootstrap made a big leap with changing the box-sizing though. It was unusable prior to that.
As long as they look good, are easy to use and have recognizable branding, what is the problem? Say HN used bootstrap with a few small tweaks for colour so it was still identifiably HN. Also your webmail client, hotel booking site & social network. What harm? Isn't familiar look and feel comforting to users?
Is there a good reason for the aversion to looking similar or is it just a product of the history of the web, with everyone doing their own thing?
I like v2 because I could just whip out a little internal site/admin console/etc. and it looked as good or better than most other similar things without changing anything. I have some stuff out there with 5-10 custom CSS rules for the whole project.
Now we've got v3 which has all sorts of wack colors and typography, like someone wanted to go "flat" but gave up halfway through.
The idea of BS3 wasn't so much "flat" as it was a "remove gradients to allow easier customisation". Previously (in BC2) you had to override a ton of stuff to get "sane" buttons again. BS3 just gives you simple buttons that you can add to immediately. Same goes for the nav-bar. I much prefer it this way.
My favorites so far are http://bootswatch.com/cerulean/
Think of Bootstrap as a model car kit. Bootstrap 2 was a Porsche that had just enough paint that people ran with it in their showcase, but that was never Bootstrap's intention. You were meant to complete the kit before showing off. Version 3 is a Tesla, but this time no paint.
Don't you see a problem right there? In my opinion, it should at least come bundled with an optional style (the old Bootstrap2 style would be fine), so that we could at least use it for fast prototyping. In its current state, it's kind of useless since I'm gonna need a designer from day 1 anyway, because it looks terrible by default.
It will. :)
And once we add the theme, it'll become clear :).
Thanks for the feedback! <3
also, I am not a fan of !important. To many times it feels "screw it we dont know how properly cascade styles so just overwrite everything with !important". Its especially problematic when you want to overwrite !important with !important :|
We only use `!important` on utilities where specificity would make them impractical. Quick floats, toggling by viewport size, etc make it necessary unfortunately. When it comes to every other component though, we don't use it at all.
Major version release enable us to break backward compatibility. Other motivations aside, I see no reason to not do it in attempts to do something better.
Can you elaborate? Bootstrap framework? so somewhere else you has mood swing and started calling 'xs' and now you want to update the rest of your framework? OR you talking about something else?
> Other motivations aside, I see no reason to not do it in attempts to do something better.
I have been in IT only last 28 years, but until now its been a normal thing that the new version is compatible with old one. Check newest MS Word you can still open Word 97 documents.
What you doing here is you are discouraging those who trusted your framework from spending hours and hours rewriting their codebase to match your newest release. Most will not achieve that, so internet will be infested with outdated bootstrap websites. One could say "nothing wrong with that, noone force you to trust bootstrap", and they will be right.
On that note, anyone can suggest alternative Framework with more mature approach to new release compatibility?
It's not really a fair comparison at all. One is a stylesheet, the other is a desktop office application.
>but until now its been a normal thing that the new version is compatible with old one
Not true at all, look at Python 2->3, PHP 4->5, jQuery 1.x->2.x. Major releases often break backwards compatibility.
>from spending hours and hours rewriting their codebase to match your newest release
Design is not something you have to rewrite to 'match the newest release', there are no security vulnerabilities in a style sheet. It is fine to stay in Bootstrap 2.
("Is it Lg, or Lrg? Err, hold on, I'll check...")
These days you write a fucking preprocessed CSS file, a few JS helper functions and it's a framework.
These days, throw a bunch of fucking zeroes and ones together and it's a framework.