

Why I prefer Bourbon over Bootstrap - dataminer
http://federicoramirez.name/why-i-prefer-bourbon-over-bootstrap/

======
coldtea
> _Another thing that bugs me is that I like having fine-control over my
> markup. I’d also rather keep the “style stuff” completely out of my markup.
> Separation of concerns is always good thing_

Not always, and this is a good example.

HTML is not supposed to be some clean semantic layer, and treating it as such
doesn't make things better. Sure, you can keep some style separate but don't
overdo it and don't fall for the "semantic" structure BS.

HTML is part of your presentation layer. You need to craft it to work well
with what you want to show. Were you need to have sound semantics is your data
layer -- that would be your DB/NoSQL/REST service/whatever source.

You're not gonna screen-scrap your pages to extract data out of them to have
to care about semantics and separation -- for that you're gonna build services
or talk to the DB directly.

Designers, who didn't have much experience in actual MVC history, and were
oversold BS terms like 'semantic' they didn't understand, created this whole
confusion in webpage development. Instead of asking for proper "black-box"
separation between UI/style and code, they treat HTML as some bastard child
between data (semantics) and presentation.

Consider how in GUI programming (which is 100 times more mature than the
HTML/CSS/JS etc mess) the UI part is not meant to be semantic or anything.
It's just a blob of style and output specs.

Having "Semantic HTML" is nothing to be proud of. It's mostly a continued
cargo cult, from people with no GUI experience. And it carries all the myths
with it (re-usability -- as if the reusable layer would be your HTML and not
your data, re-styling with just CSS -- as if anything bigger than a personal
site or a free-styling experiment like CSS Zen Garden doesn't require template
changes too, etc).

~~~
err4nt
> Having "Semantic HTML" is nothing to be proud of. It's mostly a continued
> cargo cult, from people with no GUI experience. And it carries all the myths
> with it (re-usability -- as if the reusable layer would be your HTML and not
> your data, re-styling with just CSS -- as if anything bigger than a personal
> site or a free-styling experiment like CSS Zen Garden doesn't require
> template changes too, etc).

What if you could style individual design elements and copy/paste those from
site to site like [http://staticresource.com/widget-
demo.html](http://staticresource.com/widget-demo.html) ?

------
RickS
The example in the article narrowly avoids a very common use case that's one
of the reasons I enjoy bootstrap - it lets you address multiple width cases in
the same line.

EG, if I want a content area that adapts to phone/tablet/desktop, Bootstrap
makes it as easy as

    
    
      div class="col-xs-12 col-md-8 col-lg-6"
    

in bourbon/neat it would look more like

    
    
      div.class {
        @include media($mobile) {
          @include span-columns(6);
        }
        @include media($tablet) {
          @include span-columns(8);
        }
        @include media($desktop) {
          @include span-columns(12);
        }
      }
    

I certainly concede that the latter makes more sense from a code-cleanliness
standpoint, since it keeps the styling in the stylesheet.

However, for designing in the browser / mashing stuff out quickly, I find
myself gravitating towards bootstrap because it makes prototyping really fast,
even if it slightly violates the "don't style in the structure" rule

