I'm curious as to why Zepto support was removed. Zurb was pretty big on it for Foundation 3. Smaller size than jQuery, faster load time on mobile, etc. Any ideas why this was scratched?
There were some definite compatibility issues we ran into and while jQuery 2 isn't perfect, it's pretty good, good enough we felt confident switching back from Zepto. Nothing against Zepto, just pragmatism.
I've been looking through this, trying to remember why I recently switched to Bootstrap. Was it a widget that was missing? Maybe a date-picker? Foundation doesn't really have date-pickers and such.
Hrm. Oh, right. It was angular-ui, which uses Bootstrap.
Angular integration for any of these projects is a BIG win. Because of that, I'm eagerly awaiting an RC for Angular-Semantic[1], so that I can cut over to Semantic-UI, which is, I think, best of breed as far as these frontend aesthetics go.
I'm aware of that, but there are styling differences between Foundation and Bootstrap.
The Angular-UI implementation, while self-contained, is going to have a different .modal() implementation than Foundation's, so there's always going to be relics in the implementation.
Implementing twice the framework for the same functionality seems a sure fire way to induce headaches.
Your advice isn't wrong, and worked great for a good number of months, but requires ignoring the JS components of Foundation altogether, which somewhat negates the benefits of having a big ol' framework in the first place (IMHO).
I've recently done a project with Semantic-UI, and there are still a lot of gocha's with specific nestings you'll have to follow and some ui blocks that don't mix wel, but the worst thing for me are the modals. If you have more than one modal, you will get both modals being triggered at some times, sometimes, you'll get the fade in/out animation 2 or 3 times, etc.
It's still a young project, and imho one of the best looking ones, but there are still a lot of quirks to work out.
I've started shying away from Angular a little because it's not very simple to work with existing JQuery and JavaScript components with having to re-wrap everything in directives (and supporting it when the underlining components change) has become a huge-PIA....
I'm puzzled about the switch from camelCase to snake_case for JS as shown in http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/upgrading.html#javascript-va.... The clear convention in JavaScript is camelCase, why switch away from it? (I say this as someone who in normal life using Python and Rust uses and prefers snake_case but who uses camelCase when writing JavaScript.)
Really? Why on earth would you care? What if they were to indent their code with 3 spaces? Would that be "insane", too? What if they don't like putting in unnecessary braces around one line "if" statements? Insane?
It's a (very common) stylistic choice. It's hardly insane.
I would, just because it causes fragmentation. PEP-8[0] is a big win for Python. Javascript relies on adhoc standards and best practice docs from respected entities.
I'm open to change and debate, but it should be approached carefully.
To be fair, at the time JS was developed, there was a body of well-documented knowledge involving camelCasing. First and foremost was, of course, Java. There are various RFCs involving LDAP schemas as well -- I recall seeing a hilarious document once describing how to properly name the attribute corresponding to an entity's certificate:
Seriously, does someone need to crawl every Javascript project on Github and compile statistics on naming styles before they can make an obviously true statement like this? The fact that camelCase is the norm in the language and browser environment is obvious to anyone who has written even a modest amount of JS.
Javascript was created in camelCase, and most major open source projects I've used have been camelCase. I can't find any data on it, but it fits with my experience for what that's worth.
I love Foundation, but I had to switch to Boostrap because I found it... ugly. And Bootstrap is great to quickly create "pretty" prototypes. But I've always found Foundation having better... foundations. I've used both on numerous projects and here's my take :
* The grid system now looks like bootstrap, and I don't like that. You have to choose the type of column you want to use (and I don't want to be bothered by that). so no .six anymore, it's .medium-6 or .large-6 or .small-6... They should call the .small-6 just .six so we know its the default one.
* It does look a bit better, although they removed styling of the radiobox in forms? Why?
* Overall I still prefer bootstrap's theme, I wish Foundation would offer an optional theme like bootstrap 3 does.
* OffCanvas menu is great ! I can already see plenty of applications (but for mobile only)
* The CLI is a nice thing to have but I'm gonna stay away from it. I like the easiness of copypasting files to quickly begin a small project.
* Documentation is hard to go through, doesn't allow to glance at what it offers. It's a huge improvement from F4 or F3 though.
* I use sublime text snippets all the time and this might be a huge addition!
* I like the JS that verifies forms. I usually always use this on my projects so it's nice to have it by default.
Overall I don't really know if I should switch back to Foundation. But I'll definitely use it for my next project to see how good it is.
> I love Foundation, but I had to switch to Boostrap because I found it... ugly.
I consider this is a strength, the styling is thinner so it's easier to customise. Bootstrap can feel like a bit of a battle if you want to customise it a lot. I think bootstrap is perfect for admin pages but for something a bit more custom I think foundation strikes a good balance.
yup, if I want to start a big project from scratch I'll tend towards Foundation.
But if I need to prototype something quickly, make a beautiful admin etc... I'll use Bootstrap. And I'm so used to use bootstrap that I use it for big projects as well now.
Yeah, I use Foundation for sites because I know that I'm going to completely customize the CSS.
I use Bootstrap for web apps because I rarely need to write any CSS to get a working beta that looks nice. After I've gotten input back from the initial users I'll go back and customize the look.
Interesting that I prefer Foundation (if I had to choose one or the other) over Bootstrap for exactly that reason: it's uglier.
Whenever I see a new app thingy launch with Bootstrap buttons I cringe a little bit. At least Foundation forces you to make some decisions about how you're presenting things to your users rather than just leaving it how it is (although we've all seen default Foundation apps too).
I started to notice that and have since moved over to it now. The feature updates and add-ons are coming much faster with Foundation than Bootstrap IMO.
I believe Foundation is much better for front-end design than Bootstrap. The main benefit of Bootstrap is in backend design because it managed to get more popular and consequently its much easier to find 'bootstrap ready' js based widgets etc
That's my interpretation of the comment, and real-world experience. I've written two admin sites with Bootstrap because it has all the widgets and plugins I might need on short notice.
I use Bootstrap exclusively, but I've played with Foundation (back on version 3). But honestly, I can't see what the difference in the frameworks are. Do you have a reference comparing them so that I could see what I'm missing?
I looked at the project on Github [1] and the latest tagged release is 4.3.2. It seems odd that they'd release 5.0 for download on their website before tagging it on Github; is there a particular reason for that?
Can you explain the benefit of defining media queries with em's rather than pixels? It seems like an unnecessary layer of mental translation for developers, given that you deem it necessary to list px-equivalents in the CSS comments. [1]
Also, the medium/large screen sizes in Interchange don't align with the media query sizes. Interchange says 1024px wide is large, [2] but the media query says 1024px wide is medium. Or is it just a documentation error?
So for the HTML deficient are there any template sites for foundation yet? These exist for bootstrap, and for someone who doesn't have even a single bone of design talent in his body they're a godsend.
Hi. Our company, Blue Jay Themes, specializes in making good-looking Foundation themes. Please follow us on Twitter and we’ll let you know when we launch in just a couple of weeks. Another great way to stay updated is by subscribing to our newsletter, which can be found on our website. Thanks.
Verifying email addresses is vitally important for building a high quality list. Otherwise, you can easily sign up other people for the list, they get essentially a spam email, report it as spam, and all of a sudden your list is crap because they didn't have double opt-in.
Keep double opt-in, it's necessary (and I think required in Mailchimp's case unless you use the API directly).
FoundationMade owner here. We're still working on adding themes to the collection, but it hasn't been easy. Hopefully with extra attention on Foundation 5 in general it will bring in some extra Foundation theme developers.
Looks like it dropped support for IE8, which unfortunately eliminates this as an option for a lot of client work. Seems like a solid go-to for more forward-thinking projects though.
Year to date 27% of our IE users are on 8 or less, which oddly enough accounts for 27% of our revenue from visitors using IE. IE 8 or less is 10% of our site revenue. I simply cannot exclude 10% of our revenue.
With that being said, traffic from IE 8 or less is down 58% from last year. Windows XP isn't going to die fast enough for me to begin supporting Foundation 4+.
I could push Firefox or Chrome aggressively, but that's an unfriendly half-measure.
I suspect that will no longer the case much longer, if it's not already. One of the sites I run has a VERY non-techncical/older skewing customer base, and even in that group IE <= 8.0 is down to 12% of traffic, from about 28% a year ago.
Also, a year ago non-IE browsers were split pretty much 50/50 with IE, but now down to about 35/65. (Chrome and Safari were the big risers, Firefox actually dropped from 2nd to 5th)
...this being Foundations greatest failure. Until IE8 is under 2% usage, it going to be hard to convince an ecommerce client that it's OK to leave these users on the table. Sure we can implement workarounds, but that adds a lot of overhead to development.
Does it not make sense for a front-end framework to handle cross-browser compatibility for us?
For basic stuff like the grid, it's quite easy to manually add IE8 support, given that you're never going to be seeing IE8 on a mobile phone or tablet. For some of the more advanced components you could run into issues.
I'm more curious about this which is mentioned on the page: https://github.com/hcatlin/libsass/ has anyone got it working with rails? Faster SASS compilation would make life much better (especially when bootstrap or compass are involved).
https://github.com/hcatlin/sassruby - Written by the same guy, ruby wrapper around libsass. I am pretty confident that a Rails gem is the eventual goal.
Foundation is without a doubt the nicest CSS framework I have ever used. It really, really helps me, as a programmer, create amazing interfaces without much effort at all. Combined with SASS and it's a winning combination.
One thing that seems utterly absurd is that now you need to have two ecosystems to build one project - both node and and ruby. Seeing as it is uses libsass to build now, why not ditch the ruby cli and port it to node?
The Interchange plugin saved my butt on a recent project. Client wanted to have 5 different images for different sizes, it was a breeze to setup even when having to integrate it with the supersized slider.
The only thing you get with bootstrap at this point is an insane amount of plugins (datepickers, etc). In general, you just have to pick the vanilla jquery plugins and theme them up to use foundation's syntax. I just recently did this with xeditable and poshytip.
I'll take the semantics of foundation any day. Love this framework.
You could also argue than a plugin that ships with hard-wired skin for only one CSS framework is a signal of bad underlying engineering, i.e. no separation of concerns
I fully agree with this. It's one of the things I love about datatables.js. The library comes with the ability to edit the sdom and templating for just about everything that library produces. The only funky shit is getting foundation to properly apply it's js to ajaxed content.
Can anyone tell me how to make a split button / dropdown that goes upwards (dropup)? This is one thing bootstrap has which I've been missing in foundation.
Thanks, I was hoping I wouldn't have to make changes to the js which makes upgrading a headache. I'm probably better off writing my own angular directive.
On the one hand it's never been a better time to be a front end dev, and on the other it's absolutely crazy how fast front end technology is progressing the last couple years. I just caught on to Foundation 4 in the last 4 months or so, and now here's a new release that's way more evolved. Amazing.
Thanks to the Zurb team! I'll definitely be ripping off lots of ideas for my company's tortoise-speed Drupal sites.
It may have been breaking but they did well to state that it would be breaking and was in development long enough (with RCs) that no-one should be caught by surprise.
I say this as someone who launched a site based on 2.3 as 3.0 entered RC status.
I've tried to use Foundation before and it's responsive grid was ghastly. This was the first time I tried anything responsive mind you. So I jumped towards Bootstrap 3 and it's grid was phenomal to use.
Predictable, simple and quick to iterate - everything I wanted.
I'm going to give this release a try. The interchangable items based on device widths looks fantastic! I'm really excited to give Zurb a try. :)
I've had the same experience. Debugging Foundation's responsive grid turned out to be a nightmare. Just migrated the project to the latest Bootstrap and it's much more intuitive to work with. Also, Foundation has more styling of form elements which gets really annoying really fast.
What's the recommended way to use this with a python dev environment?
I'd rather not have to install ruby too just to rebuild the css. When one of these is announced I usually find myself navigating the various poorly-maintained python modules that process the source files, get lost, give up, and go back to plain css.
Perhaps I could just add a bit of css to a static build instead? Are there any shortcomings to that?
One of the features Foundation 5 is advertising is support for libsass, which is the C implementation by the original author of Sass, so you should be good without having to install Ruby.
When I was choosing a framework for a redesign for my blog (switching from Bootstrap since it was getting cumbersome), I decided to try out UIkit, since I ended up not needing any of the JavaScript plugins or super-fancy CSS effects.
However, after taking a look at Foundation 5's plugins, I will definitely try using the framework if I need to undertake a website with more ambitious functionality.
I'm new to web design and have been experimenting with a few other development environments. Reading through these comments I became excited to learn more about foundation. I went to their site and looked at their site examples. Many of them were broken and didn't seem to work as intended, nor were they very beautiful to the uninitiated. This was on a desktop using chrome. I didn't bother to check with my mobile.
My main platform so far has been extremely buggy too and is not even primarily made to create websites. I've been using Google Web Designer. Take my advice with a grain of salt as I represent hobbyist developers who thought "hey, i'd like to build a site. what tool should I start with?" I would not invest $200 to enroll in your intro course for something that gave me an initial first impression of being flimsy. However, it is equally likely that I am unable to realize the full potential of your product with my limited understanding of web development at first glance.
I'm excited about seeing how Macaw works and am going to begin a new project with Bootstrap soon. While my main focus has been purely static web design I plan to incorporate dynamic applications within my approach very soon.
When you get into those dynamic applications I think you'll find the likes of Foundation much more appealing. This is not a WYSIWYG-style tool, this is for developers building sites by hand and the example styles aren't often used in production.
I would just like to say that I love Foundation! Kudos to the team and congrats on the new release. I look forward to exploring the new version. That being said, I am not really digging the new documentation page. The sample code containers should have a non-white background or at least some kind of a border.
I don't know why (maybe I'm just not good with css and html in general), but I'm always confused when looking at these grid systems. Trying to use zurb in a project now and I'm kinda lost. Any good resources other than their docs for sort of showing how to use zurb in a full project?
Are you talking about Zurb's grid system[0] specifically, or referring to Zurb/Bootstrap as "grid systems"?
If it's the latter, a simple Google search for "how to use Bootstrap" turns up a lot of resources, including this one[1], which looks good. You might be able to find Foundation-specific ones, but Bootstrap seems to have the edge in popularity.
Webdesigntuts+ has a thorough series covering Foundation 4 you might be interested in. If your a Lynda subscriber, they’ve got a couple of courses on Foundation 4, as well. There’s not a whole lot of difference between the grid in Foundation 4 and Foundation 5. Foundation 5 does add a new medium breakpoint which is great for tablets.
Man, the quality of the videos on Lynda.com always impresses me. But I don't wanna pay $25 when that's the only series I want. Wish I could just do a la carte.
Where are you hung up? It might just be something simple that I, or anyone else around here can answer quickly. Everything I learned was from trial and error through messing with F4's grid system.
Some pain points from using Foundation (4) in our latest project:
* topbar sucks
* custom forms are horrible (they seem to have been removed from 5, or maybe justs the docs are missing)
Also, using under_score instead of camelCase in javascript is a questionable choice with no real benefits.
I switched from Foundation 4 to Flatstrap (a version of Bootstrap) instead because I like the flat UI. v4 had many problems with JS and especially topbar was never good enough. I ended up creating my own topbar which is not ideal. Also the lack of fixed cols is a big issue for desktop design.
How is their inclusion of a medium break point not at the top of this thread? This is the most significant and noticeable addition to the Framework IMO.
Someone appears to have fixed this. The main content was showing below the left sidebar. ( I have Chrome's default font as Android Sans, that might have had something to do with it).
Tested and duplicated on an iPad air here. It's Safari's issue, though.
There's a bug in mobile Safari that I can replicate on other sites. Scrolling on Craigslist's map view when the page is loading also crashes the browser, which leads me to believe it's something related to attaching to events in certain states.
First, a big thanks to all the Zurb folks who work on Foundation, I can't wait to dig into the new release!
Just for the sake of another data point (albeit an obscure one): The page crashed Chrome on my iPhone 4 running iOS 7.03, both with other pages open and as the only page.
already foundation 5. I've only just had two dates with foundation 4. Between foundation and Jeet, I'm so stoked to have these to work and collaborate on.
As with prior versions of Foundation, Yeoman will get plenty of generators for it. At least ZURB's CLI guarantees an easy way to get the canonical version, which is not always apparent among the various Yeoman generators. Also ZURB seems more Ruby-oriented than JS-oriented, as most of their installation methods are based on the Ruby ecosystem.
As much as Bootstrap, I imagine. Not sure if moreso or lessso though. Perhaps different use cases? It looks like developers prefer Bootstrap, not entirely sure why - perhaps something as simple as the documentation is structured better for them - or that was the initial crowd who was exposed to it.
I think jQuery and Bootstrap are "developer ready". IE , easy to use. The easiest lib/project to use will always be the most successfull one. Doesnt mean there is no place for competition, and it doesnt mean it will always be the framework everybody use. Furthermore this is "Twitter" bootstrap. Most people have no idea what Zurb is.
Foundation's enough of a standard that you don't have to worry about that. It'll be around indefinitely and won't get abandoned like some hobbyist project or superseded by Bootstrap.
They're not though. The author worked for Twitter when he released the first version of Bootstrap, but Twitter never actually used it in production. Twitter doesn't promote it anymore either; BS3 got moved to twbs/bootstrap on GitHub, and the new marketing site doesn't call it Twitter Bootstrap anymore.
ZURB doesn't have a huge consumer product, but they're a pretty big name in design, and they have half a dozen people who regularly work on Foundation/Foundation support.
I agree that I should have written it past-tense... But, until recently, it was clear that Twitter's name was attached to the project. A Google search for "Twitter Bootstrap" pulls up all the relevant docs, and the first line of the 2.3.2 docs is "Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat"
"Interchange uses media queries to dynamically load responsive content that is appropriate for different users' browsers.”
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/interchange.html
Offcanvas Javascript (Originally bolt-on, not bundled)
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/offcanvas.html
"Abide is an HTML5 form validation library that supports the native API by using patterns and required attributes."
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/abide.html
Zepto support has been removed from Foundation 5.
Docs are continuing to look better, and they still have docs back to Foundation v2.
Thanks Zurb!