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Comment by cnbuff410 | Hacker News Reader

I hate heavy and opinionated frontend framework like bootstrap. I have been using Pure css and plain css/js/html to do some prototype and really enjoyed the process, and the only concern is I'm not great at design, so all the prototypes I did don't feel like modern and slick.

I started trying Web Starter Kit[1] recently and really like it, it's light with principle of "don't get in your way", it has very fine default design feeling yet still allow you to easily customize the look and feel.

Toolkit looks like it's even lightweight and share the similar "minimal" principle, I will give it a try and see if it provides enough out of box, and I hope to see more of this kind of light yet modern frontend framework.

[1] https://github.com/google/web-starter-kit

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If you use Bootstrap from the source, it's actually pretty modular. I bring it in with npm, then copy the bootstrap.less and variables.less into my own project (updating the references to those in the node_modules path)... this lets me do quite a bit in terms of not loading the kitchen sink, while still being flexible.

As an aside, I'm not quite sure why less hasn't won over sass... By nature of less being JS driven it is much closer to best in breed tools you need anyway for web development (npm) in my opinion. It kind of bugs me that to do modern web development, you are likely to want/need to have Node (or io.js), Python and Ruby installed. I tend to stick to Node based tools (there is sass for node, but it brings in a binary module). This isn't to be expressly negative, just that I'm surprised there's still broad support for both less and sass... with sass having a bit of an edge in the greater community, it would seem.

Sass is more powerful

Do developers really care whether a tool is written in JS rather than Ruby, or vice-versa? If you're running *nix it's pretty likely you have Ruby installed out of the box anyway.

There's nothing inherently tying you to Ruby anyhow, anyone could write a SASS parser in JavaScript. It's just that nobody has because there is no need for it.

The SASS team are writing one in JavaScript so they must feel there's a need: https://github.com/sass/node-sass

Node-sass isn't a JavaScript port of SASS, it's a Node.JS binding for libsass, the native (C) SASS compiler. The first paragraph of the readme tells you as much.

It's more convenient to be able to handle all dependencies through the same package manager.

Personally I prefer Scala and thus use SBT for most dependencies, requiring the user to use Bundler or NPM as well for just one dependency can get a bit annoying. In the case of SBT it actually does have some integration with NPM since it's used so much for client assets (and there is Trireme which is a pure-Java Node clone), but Ruby dependencies still mean adding one or two manual build steps.

If you have docker installed, you can use this 9 MB sass image instead of installing ruby or compiling node-sass: https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/jbergknoff/sass/

You might also enjoy Skeleton.[0] It's a very lightweight responsive boilerplate "file".

Check the examples section (currently only one). [1]

[0] http://getskeleton.com/

[1] http://getskeleton.com/#examples

I agree with you about purecss and I also like Skeleton. I had a look at the Web-starter-kit page and have never been more confused about a sites design. I checked twice I had not zoomed in to 200%, and I could not follow the page structure at all.

I do hate the look of Material Design as well, so maybe it's just me and Google that need to learn how to communicate.

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