

Ask HN: Best CSS layout and widget set combination for desktop style web apps? - dsiegel2275

I&#x27;m leading a small team building out a suite of web apps, in many of which aspects of the design will mimic  traditional desktop app UI patterns - independent scrollable areas, fixed footers, toolbars, complex layouts, etc.<p>We&#x27;ve built a couple of the more simpler apps using Bootstrap, and while the &#x27;widget&#x27; set that the library offers is nice, it doesn&#x27;t seem like this will offer the layout support that we are going to need in the more complex apps, or will it?<p>I&#x27;ve looked at Foundation for Apps and that seems promising. I&#x27;ve tried to get Flexbox to play nice with Bootstrap and failed. Grid style sheets looks kinda amazing. I&#x27;ve considered also just going pure Flexbox and rolling our own styling for UI components.<p>So, what combination of CSS layout approaches and reusable, styled UI widget sets have others had success with for developing complex web apps?<p>The rest of our front-end tech stack is React&#x2F;webpack&#x2F;ES6 (via Babel)<p>Responsiveness isn&#x27;t necessarily a requirement but would be a nice bonus. The browsers that we do need to support are IE11+, FF34+, Chrome41+.
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dylanhassinger
If I were in your shoes I would roll my own, starting with normalize.css and a
very simple grid system.

But if you want to use a full framework, i think Foundation for Apps and Kendo
are your main options.

You could also use a minimalist framework like PureCSS
[http://purecss.io/](http://purecss.io/)

