Hey all,
I'm putting a stack together for a new website which I am building from scratch. It will only target modern browsers with full flex-box support. This greatly reduces, but, presumably, does not eliminate cross-browser rendering discrepancies.
The plan is to build the website to material design's specs. Previously, I built a material Chrome extension and the layout came out well, http://imgur.com/a/vyd56. I am fluent in material design specs and feel capable of creating reusable web components. However, that project only targeted the latest versions of Chrome -- not all modern browsers.
With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to evaluate tools which might help ensure consistent design across platforms. I played around with a few of the more popular material tools, but, unfortunately, was pretty let down.
I've tried out:
- MDL, http://www.getmdl.io/: It's too lite. There's not enough components to build a full-fledged application and if I'm going to be building some components myself then I don't have much of a desire to mix-and-match.
- Polymer, https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/: I think Polymer will be better in another year. Right now it feels half-baked. Some of the components have very obvious issues which I hacked around to get a prototype going. Documentation was difficult to parse and after 3 days I don't feel great about moving forward with it.
- Materialize, http://materializecss.com/: This is the next most promising. I have not yet played around with it and would love to hear some pros/cons regarding it.
That said, I'm totally comfortable "materialifying" components myself. It would be nice to have it all for free, but not mission critical.
So, I'm left wondering: should I stop looking for something so 'heavy' and settle on a simple grid system. Bootstrap? Skeleton? Others? Is it even worth considering a grid system if I'm just going to use flex containers?
