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Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Answer: You wouldn't. Bootstrap's extremely bloated, requires jQuery, and has a huge (required) JS file. Choose a small, leaner CSS framework, like Min - only 995 bytes and it is near feature parity with Bootstrap. http://minfwk.com

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How do you define 'near feature parity'? From that page, Min doesn't appear to have anything like the dropdowns, button groups, tabs, more than half the navbar options, pagination, progress bars, etc. that Bootstrap has...

It could certainly be useful, but doesn't appear to me to be anywhere close to feature parity.

Min has dropdowns and all of Bootstrap's navbar options. You'll just have to use the navbar plugin (owenversteeg/min-navbar-plugin) Progress bars, pagination, and button groups are all coming for Min 2 or Min 2.5, although demand for them is very low.

If you have a specific feature you'd like implemented, just open an issue.

I disagree with your post.

1. As stephen_g said, Min is nowhere near feature parity with Bootstrap.

2. IIRC, Bootstrap doesn't need jQuery, or its own js if all you want is a css framework.

3. You can make a custom build of Bootstrap to cut out the cruft that you don't need.

I like minimal frameworks (YUI's Pure is one of my favs), but 12-column layouts are generally superior than 10-column layouts, unless you desperately need 5 equal columns for your site.

I see that you wrote Min - I'd strongly consider changing your grids to 12 col. More divisors, and it's somewhat of an industry standard. Also, no normalize.css?

Lastly, you'll probably have a better adoption rate for your framework if you tone down the attitude and false claims. There's just no need for it.

1. Min has dropdowns and all of Bootstrap's navbar options. Progress bars, pagination, and button groups are all coming for Min 2 or Min 2.5, although demand for them is very low.

2. Nope, Bootstrap requires jQuery. This is the exact error message I get trying to run an official Bootstrap example page without jQuery:

"Error: Bootstrap requires jQuery"

3. Sure, but will you? That's a common argument against Min, but I rarely find anyone willing to modify their download of Bootstrap for two reasons: 1) No CDN and 2) They usually need to add something later and don't know why it doesn't work. Min also provides a "custom build" option which is in fact encouraged - but people ignore it for the two reasons above.

Good point about 12 columns; I've opened an [issue](https://github.com/OwenVersteeg/min/issues/16).

Regarding normalize.css - I don't really see why I'd need it. Min already does many things it does and they work fine; in fact, Min works in Internet Explorer 5.5 and up.

Re (2): That error message is a tad terse; the majority of Bootstrap is pure CSS and doesn't require any JS.

1. So you've matched a number of good features that Bootstrap has, but you seem to be missing:

- Responsive grid control based on browser size (.col-md, -sm, -xsm, -lg)

- Nestable grids (apparently)

- Fluid container

- Offsetting columns

- Column ordering

- Subheading/secondary heading text

- Lead body copy

- Text alignment classes

- Blockquote styling

- List styling (no discs, inline)

- Description elements (dl/dt/dd)

- Code/pre formatting

- Various table styles

- Responsive tables

And that's just going halfway down Bootstrap's css documentation page without touching any of the 20 or so css components or the the 12 or so js modules that Bootstrap provides. You personally might not need even 90% of them, but you cannot make the claim that Min has anywhere near the features of Bootstrap. It's disingenuous. I wouldn't make the claim for YUI's Pure[0], and it's a similarly-scoped framework. In fact, that's one of the selling points to a minimal framework - it isn't "bloated".

2. That's because that example page requires jQuery, just like many other sites require jQuery. I've used Bootstrap several times as just a CSS framework, and it works well. You obviously can't use any js modules, as all of them depend on jQ, but none of the pure-css modules do.

3. I have built custom versions of Bootstrap, so yes I would do it. I'd wager most people wouldn't, but I don't know if I see that as a fault of Bootstrap's. I applaud you encouraging modularity, and I wish that more people would go that route with Bootstrap.

Normalize is intended to give consistent results across browsers. If you've accounted for all of the discrepancies between browsers, then that's great! I'd wager that there are some cases that you haven't caught.

I understand where you're coming from wrt. monolithic frameworks, and I do wish more people would take the time to slim down their libraries. Hell, I wrote a grunt plugin[1] that looks at a site's outputted js and determines a minimal build of Lo-Dash[2], and it's only 10kB gzipped.

[0]: http://purecss.io/

[1]: https://github.com/jjt/grunt-lodash-autobuild

[2]: http://lodash.com/

When I said that Min was near feature parity with Bootstrap, I was referring to the percent of use cases covered (which, in my mind, is the more important metric.) Min covers the vast majority of use cases that I've seen Bootstrap used for. Min also doesn't include CSS classes for offsetting or text alignment, as this is fairly trivial. That said, Min will soon be exactly at feature parity of Bootstrap (soon is relative; it will be by the release of Min v2.0)

Regarding jQuery, it's needed for the responsive navbar and navbar dropdowns, two fairly common use cases. It's also included in most Bootstrap sites, even if it's not used for anything else. (This is based on a quick survey of Bootstrap Expo.)

Unfortunately, from my informal survey of websites using Min, most seem to use the entire framework. That said, this makes some sense since they only save a maximum of ~700 bytes by picking and choosing, but for other projects (like Bootstrap) it makes less sense.

I'll take a closer look at normalize.css later this weekend. Thanks for the advice about a 12-column grid.

p.s. If you wouldn't mind, could you take a second to vote in Min's button design thread: https://github.com/OwenVersteeg/min/issues/6? Thanks!

I use Bootstrap without jQuery all the time, so that is not true. I also make custom builds for just the stuff I need to keep file size down. Anyways, I just looked at Min and was a bit disappointed. The demo page has the look and feel of a framework that might have existed 10 years ago -- it doesn't look polished at all and I would never even attempt to try it out based on that demo. The 2 sites built with the framework also look about 10 years old. I realize it is a lightweight framework, but so is Pure and Topcoat, and their examples look a lot better. Sure they may be a bit bigger than 995 bytes, but with high speed internet and LTE, that is less important than it was in the past. I'd rather have a larger CSS file and a better looking site.

Regarding jQuery, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it required for dropdowns and responsive navbars?

Regarding Min, I'm wondering what you think looks 2004-ish about it. If it's the buttons, those are in for a change; please cast your vote in the button design thread here: https://github.com/OwenVersteeg/min/issues/6 If it's anything else, just let me know (via an issue or a comment) and I can fix it. I'm always open to feedback.

Also, a substantial portion of people still have slow internet speeds (example: me.) It's common knowledge that if a website is too slow people will just leave, and for lots of websites an extra few percent of users would make a difference.

It is required for dropdowns and the responsive navbar.

Also, I didn't mean to be talking down on your framework. I have personally never made a front end framework or released any sort of open source project, so it is cool that you have done that. All I am really trying to say is there is a tradeoff between file size and what a framework can offer.

You have chosen to go the smallest possible file size route, which is cool, but I would never use it in it's current state. The page advertises support for IE5.5 and it shows. It looks like something that was developed when IE5.5 was around. It is easy to support a single text input in IE5, but try building out a complex form in CSS and see what happens in old IE. Also, nothing looks finely polished. I just see a bunch of colored rectangles filled with text. There are no examples of typography beside the header tags. The padding\margins on buttons and alerts look funny. The forms are completely lacking. There is an issue with the navbar where the entire thing slides up a pixel or two when the dropdowns appear. The icons are just standard unicode characters that really have little use on the web and look dated. Again, I don't mean to knock your framework, I just think it needs a bit of polish and it is unfair to say it offers most of what bootstrap does. I'd also highly recommend you put normalize in there.

I'll defiantly keep an eye out for version 2! Good luck!

Hmm. I'll add a better main/examples page for v2, and some parts are going to be spruced up. The icons have to be unicode due to size restrictions, unfortunately. I don't see an issue with the padding/margins for the buttons and alerts, and I can't reproduce the navbar issue. Could you take a screenshot and describe what you think it should look like?

For the forms and the alerts, I'm not sure what I should add. A border-radius? A shadow? Maybe I should open a voting issue similar to the button thread.

Regarding normalize.css, I'm not sure why I would add it - Min already covers most of what it does and I'm not sure what benefit I'd get from it, seeing as adding it'd double the size of Min.

Finally, thank you very much for your feedback!

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