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Please stop with these things. They're never fit for purpose, and now there's another thing that looks - to non technical people - like a panacea for all development woes. Designers will never follow your constraints. Managers will never understand why this hasn't magically reduced our estimates by 90%. And yet again, it's just "developers being difficult" because there's a bunch of guys in India who say they CAN work with this for half the price.

This sort of stuff is worse than useless.




Nobody is forcing you to use it. I don't use these libraries anymore, but that doesn't mean they don't have a purpose. And no, people shouldn't 'stop with these things'. You shouldn't be the one telling people what they should and should not be doing. You don't have to like it, but there are many developers who are really bad at styling. They don't have a good eye for design and they're trying to build a usable product, or they have an internal need, or want to learn. Libraries such as these have many purposes, even if you don't like them.


But people will be forced to use it. That's my complaint.


I have also had the misfortune of explaining to my PM and designer that the framework they chose heavily limits our ability to colour outside the lines.

These kitchen-sink CSS frameworks get you started quickly but it's incredibly difficult to override any one aspect of them. This comes off as a blessing while building out your initial design, but ultimately any team with enough design and development resources is going to want some custom UI/UX elements and what would ordinarily take half a day to build requires an additional week to integrate without side effects.

The initial development velocity gives a false sense of progress, as it is followed with death by a thousand cuts.

Whenever the tech stack is chosen by a non-developer, the the above scenario inevitably plays out. That's why we offer a stack optimized for ease of onboarding, decreased overall complexity, and reduced technical debt. The clients who use our stack tend to have fewer problems down the line.


You're right, people need to stop coming up with all this stuff. I have an idea to end it: why don't we just take all the good parts of all the frameworks and leave out the bad parts and finally make one framework that everyone can use? DM to discuss.

(p.s. this is a joke! no need to actually DM me except for coffee)


Working on enterprise-level sites this stuff is essential, not useless. CSS modals are a solved problem, I don't feel like solving it again. Designers won't follow any constraints.


I dont agree with this. Just because semantic(or any other tool) does not work for you does not mean it should not exists. Semantic is a massive time saver as a small team trying to build a functional product, where the team cant afford to have a pure front end focused developer. As a 2 person team, I can get a lot of functional product out with Semantic. I would recommend semantic any day.

It might not work for you, but like I said, it does not mean it should not exist. Thats me trying to defend a framework that I absolutely worship.


Not sure about your definition of "these things" -- are you including say Bootstrap, jQuery or Angular/React/Vue/etc.?


Spot on. Do we work at the same company? I deal with the exact same problems every day with our in-house component framework.


Wow, I wonder what happened in your childhood.




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