

Why Twitter’s Bootstrap is Important - tdrnd
https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/99fdd6e46586

======
mddw
Now bootstrap is important, yesterday it was the 360 grid, tomorrow it'll be
another hype bandwagon.

First, Bootstrap did not standardize anything. It's a biased perspective to
think so : most websites and most developpers don't even know about bootstrap.
And those who know about it do not necessarily agree with it (per exemple I
hate their JS coding style.)

Second, the myth about "changing your design without touching HTML". Sure,
there're some cases where it's possible, but by experience it won't happen.
Never. Sadly (or not), a redesign is always coupled with some HTML changes.
Bootstrap does not change anything.

So, I think Bootstrap is far less important than, say, Wordpress was. It's a
cool tool, useful for a "design dumb" like me to pull a quick demo without a
true designer, but in the end it makes boring websites with boring code. It's
also a overhyped tool, which won't survive (along with the whole stupid OOCSS
thing.)

~~~
colemorrison
Well said. It's a useful tool. But does not standardize HTML.

~~~
OGC
HTML standardizes HTML.

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jgrahamc
_The ulimate success of Twitter’s Bootstrap was the standardization of HTML
syntax._

This is a great example of the "medium.com Style": a grandiose claim with no
factual back up. It's getting a little tiresome. I suspect there are some good
things written on the site, but if this is the standard then it's no different
from 'random guy X's blog' except it all looks the same.

And, also, what does that sentence mean? HTML already is standard.

~~~
obviouslygreen
The medium.com proliferation on HN has disappointed me as well.

Like at least some other recent articles, I have to assume that most of us
already know (or at least have our own opinions, which are only half likely to
match up and unlikely to be changed by articles like this). In which case this
is not for tech people, but ancillary staff that like to think they're tech
people (...VC's? PM's?).

I'm not sure why these keep getting upvoted.

~~~
jpdevereaux
I'm not sure why they get upvoted either, but I get why they're written. The
real point of this article is the second-to-last paragraph, where he says
(paraphrased) "check out my startup website that I didn't even use Bootstrap
to make."

------
zachgersh
I think the more pertinent reason why Bootstrap is so important is due to the
fact that it elevates the look / feel bar of all websites.

There is no reason that your website should look absolutely shit. Just
dropping in of the most boilerplate bootstrap files brings your site up to a
new level and that is with 5 minutes of work.

Spend more than five minutes with bootstrap and you can get something
spectacular. Bootstrap made creating a better looking website accessible to
everyone in addition to speeding up the amount of time it takes to execute a
design vision.

~~~
ryanisinallofus
I agreed with this sentiment a year or so ago but Bootstrap sites already look
pretty dated. I think something like Foundation is a better idea because the
site looks pretty great "after 5 minutes" without looking like a Foundation
site.

~~~
zachgersh
I think the default site while somewhat bland isn't dated just yet. Over used,
definitely but dated not yet.

------
jcoder
I don't see any argument that Bootstrap's HTML is in any way becoming a
standard. When you start a project, if you are not using Bootstrap, do you
reference the Bootstrap guide when you write your HTML? I don't, and have
never seen evidence of it in any code base.

~~~
andybak
No but a developer recently mentioned several reasons why he didn't want to
use Bootstrap. and I realised that I didn't care as long as the HTML looked
pretty much the same - could trivially be converted into such (by globally
replacing classnames etc)

So this article chimed with me.

~~~
Charos
Do you recall why he didn't want to use it? As I see it, it's a useful tool,
but I couldn't come up with any reason to specifically avoid it. Are there
licensing or IP concerns when using it for a budding business?

------
tracker1
What's interesting, is the markup and tagging are very different in Bootstrap
3 from version 2. Which kind of breaks the "just get used to writing
Bootstrap-style HTML"

I like Bootstrap a lot, but there is a cost to it, a lot of the time you are
best off building from the less files in your project, and simply using them
as-needed. I was actually surprised that a new version of a site I had in
jQueryUI actually had a heavier payload with Bootstrap (including JS modules)
than it did before. I still like Bootstrap's look better, but will be far more
conscious of the load in the future.

Beyond this, in general, I only write my markup to target the framework when
it fits the framework. There's still a lot of custom markup and CSS that goes
into things. Beyond this, the look/feel are very consistent to different
sites, which sometimes leads to a "oh, bootstrap again" feeling to things.

Bootstrap is a great getting started guide, but will restate the following...
look at and understand the source parts in .less, make sure to use the mixins
in your own code instead of replicating. And only use the parts you _really_
need.

------
jerrya
Semi-offtopic, but is "medium" twitter's version of "posterous"?

I just noticed that to leave a comment at a medium site, a person needs to
login through twitter. And the only social media support they seem to offer in
my 15 second random survey of their front page is via twitter.

Ah, a bit of googling shows medium and twitter share co-founder Ev Williams.
<http://mashable.com/2013/04/17/medium-acquires-matter/>

So is there any formal ownership between twitter and medium?

~~~
chimeracoder
> So is there any formal ownership between twitter and medium?

No, they're separate entities.

On a related note, I do find the "Goldilocks" progression of Ev's companies
amusing - Xanga (big), Twitter (small), and Medium ('just right'?[0]).

[0] Time will tell!

~~~
davewiner
He didn't start Xanga, he started Blogger.

~~~
chimeracoder
Right, I was confusing him with Biz, who was indeed involved with all four.

~~~
davewiner
That's right! :-)

------
wyck
I don't see anything standard about terms like "jumbotron masthead", "pure-g"
or even "container".

Most large project have their own markup standards and that's pretty normal,
it certainly wasn't invented by bootstrap.

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dbanksdesign
I think the bigger reason why Bootstrap is important is that it is getting
designers and developers to think about style guides and modular design/code.
Every application should have some sort of bootstrap-style style guide/code
base of reusable elements & modules to create a consistent look and make
development easier.

Bootstrap is not the first to do this and there are others like Foundation by
Zurb which shouldn't be overlooked.

~~~
at-fates-hands
This is what I got out of the article as well. Not so much using Bootstrap,
just using any kind of modular code is what's important.

I work at a fairly large company and we just redesigned one of the sites and
it was based on what I would call a "modified" bootstrap. Just enough to make
a lot of the elements proprietary, but extendable to the rest of the companies
websites who are all using different styles and designs. The future is really
to move all these sites to this kind of modular approach.

It also makes it easy for incoming devs to get up to speed and keeps the code
consistent. You don't have to come up with crazy class names and spend hours
trying to figure out what the last developer was doing. In general, it just
makes everybody's job a lot easier.

~~~
dbanksdesign
Brad Frost talks about this, calling it 'Atomic Design' in this really good
talk: <http://vimeo.com/67476280>

------
mmanfrin
Offtopic, but: Does anyone use selection tooltip things like on that site?
They absolutely annoy me, as I'm one to compulsively select and deselect text
I'm reading.

------
bobfirestone
I think there is a disconnect between what many of readers who have commented
here think of when they hear standardization and what the author intended.
Bootstrap has not introduced a standard in the way that html5 is a standard.
It is a standard in the sense of a common vocabulary shared between users.
Anyone who has worked with bootstrap for more than a couple of days will
instantly recognize that a div with a span6 class is half the width of the
page.

One of my biggest frustrations at my job is not having bootstrap and not
having that common vocabulary keeping things in order. This makes the design
specs vague to work with, difficult to implement and the end result is a ton
of one off styling reinventing the wheel instead of reusing a handful of
global styles.

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nissimk
This is off-topic, but I find bootstrap dropdown menu code to be lacking in
several areas:

1) I haven't been able to figure out how to have the same dropdown pop up on
multiple triggers without cloning the menu for each trigger.

2) It doesn't automatically drop up or down based on the location of the
trigger in the page. For example if the trigger is near the bottom of the page
the menu should pop up, otherwise down.

3) It seems like the popup needs to be in the same container div as the
trigger so depending on overflow you sometimes end up having to scroll to see
the menu.

Am I just not using it right? Are there other jQuery / javascript popup menus
that have these features or add them to bootstrap?

------
pavs
One side effect of Bootstrap (from having some experience with it) is that I
can almost instantly tell which site is using bootstrap.

I am not sure if its a good thing if more sites starts to look very similar or
have similar design elements.

~~~
willholloway
Take a look at my personal site without checking the source:

<http://willholloway.net/>

Can you instantly tell if it was built with boostrap?

~~~
NoodleIncident
Yes. The buttons on the bottom give it away.

Critiques:

The site looks bad on a sideways phone due to premature responsive design. I
had to flip to vertical to actually see anything.

More importantly, after scrolling to the bottom and clicking the 'up' button,
it took about 25 back-button taps to get back here. Don't mess with URLs,
please.

~~~
mindcrime
_More importantly, after scrolling to the bottom and clicking the 'up' button,
it took about 25 back-button taps to get back here. Don't mess with URLs,
please._

Yeah, please don't break the back button. That's one of the surest ways to
guarantee that I won't be visiting your site again.

------
addflip
Just Twitter Bootstrap it's not Twitter's product.

~~~
dsego
It's not even twitter bootstrap anymore, just bootstrap.

------
tzaman
I actually skipped Bootstrap for one single reason: everyone uses it. That's
not a bad thing per-se, but the problem is that developers don't bother
changing _anything_ so each Bootstrapped site looks exactly as the next.

That's why I chose ZURB Foundation (now version 4), I love that it's written
in sass out of the box (as opposed to Bootstrap's less), comes as gem, and
more importantly, it has a _settings_ file, which is kinda the central point
of where you define all variables, from dimensions to colors - so apart from
HTML it's very few custom css you need to write and still stand out.

~~~
untog
_and more importantly, it has a settings file, which is kinda the central
point of where you define all variables, from dimensions to colors_

So does Bootstrap, though. It's just that people don't change it.

~~~
tzaman
I wasn't aware of it, thank you for the heads up!

------
nahname
To me, Twitter Bootstrap was important because it was the first time I added
visual elements without having to hack the existing CSS. Most things I needed
were already generalized and well documented.

Contrasting this to working on every one of the dozens of web projects I have
been on. It was night and day. One was finding a kindred spirit and the other
a train wreck. CSS is always the broken window code base of any project. TB
was the first experience where it made enough sense that I didn't need to
break more windows to get things to work.

------
ganarajpr
I think Bootstrap IS important. Why? Because it improved the look of the
average website. It made creating MVP's easier while not compromising on the
look and feel much. Ofcourse, when a lot of sites use Bootstrap, they start to
look the same. Blaming that on bootstrap is kind of insane.

If you want to criticize it, create an open source project that has more than
50k stars on github. Then we shall talk. That is a show of its popularity in
the world. Also, the second most starred project is not even close.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Bootstrap is an answer to a 10 year old question posited by CSS Zen Garden:
Can we make the web beautiful?

Bootstrap is a great default starting point for a website. Its a great tool
for internal development where you may have to write an app but don't want to
spend days making it look nice. You can do anything you want with it.

If you complain it makes sites look the same, then ask yourself how many of
those sites would have just gotten a template from Template Monster a few
years back...

~~~
obviouslygreen
_Bootstrap is an answer to a 10 year old question posited by CSS Zen Garden:
Can we make the web beautiful?_

If this is the question, then the emphasis needs to be on who "we" is. If it's
developers, then yes. If it's an ephemeral "the world" we, then no, I don't
think this is the case; people were making beautiful (subjectively, of course)
websites before bootstrap, and will continue to do so afterwards. Most of the
designers I know don't use it as a basis unless they're coming onto a project
that used it to start with.

 _Note: I accidentally either upvoted or downvoted you while copying the text
to quote... if it was a downvote, I apologize._

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boubiyeah
Please do not use this very average technology in production :-( Keep it for
demos, proof of concepts, admin back offices, that's where it shines.

You can tell the authors are more on the designer side when you look at the
quality of the JS components...

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eaigner
Bootstrap is just a bad excuse for no design/js skills. Its JS codebase is an
abomination, as well as it's overly verbose CSS. It's only good for quick-and-
dirty projects and has nothing to do with a well crafted site.

