No front-end list would be complete without mentioning Materialize, a responsive front-end framework based on Material Design. One of Skeleton’s biggest assets is “The Grid”, a 12-column fluid grid, which consists of rows and columns similar to other CSS frameworks, but with the plus that it’s extremely simple to customize. Skeleton is simple and right to the point, but if you are willing to put in the extra work, you can scale up the framework and customize it to your project’s requirements. If you want a framework that can do anything, then you will be better served looking elsewhere, but if you want something to power a small-scale project, then this is the one for you. Lightweight, simple, minimalistic are the perfect adjectives to describe it. In many ways, Skeleton is the polar opposite of Bootstrap, and that’s a good thing. It has all the necessary components for web applications like a responsive grid, buttons, basic typography, and many other UI elements. It’s robust, complex, and it powers some of the most prominent websites, including Adobe, Amazon, and eBay. Just like Bootstrap, Foundation has every perk expected from an advanced framework. Their tagline is “ A Framework for any device, medium, and accessibility” and, boy, do they deliver. Let’s start with the obvious alternative: Foundation. Unless you know the framework inside out, finding the right option to adjust can be an exercise in frustration.įortunately, the market is huge and there are dozens of alternatives out there waiting to be discovered and to help your projects stand out in today’s market. The extra work we have to put into Bootstrap to make it look like something unique is time better spent in other areas of your development process, so much so that in some cases it might be preferable to just use Sass and compile your CSS.Īnother point is that Bootstrap can get verbose to the point where it can lead to a lot of unneeded HTML output. In a saturated market that strives for the user’s attention, if you want your webpage to leave a long-lasting impression, you can’t have it looking like every other website in existence. There are simply too many web pages and apps that share the Bootstrap flavor – over 18% of the top million websites if BuiltWith is to be believed. So, if Bootstrap is such a loved framework, and the results are nothing short of stunning, why not stick with it then? Well, this is one of those cases where popularity is detrimental to the framework. The Case for Frameworks but Against Bootstrap That’s not all – most frameworks have years of development behind them, so they tend to be less prone to bugs and security liabilities than proprietary solutions. Frontend and backend frameworks are huge timesavers and can save you a few headaches, especially if you are running against a deadline. So, if all frameworks are opinionated, why not just build the frontend from the ground up? Well, pretty much for the same reason: time. That might be acceptable for smaller projects, where a couple of hours of tinkering should suffice, but for big scale projects that might mean spending days on end customizing the look of the project. In other words, it has one way of doing things and the more you move away from it, the more you have to tinker and bend it to your needs. Having said that, Bootstrap is far from perfect and, in many cases, its drawbacks can outweigh the gains of implementing it in your projects.įor one, Bootstrap is highly opinionated. And why wouldn’t that be the case? It’s a solid open-source framework that can turn any project into a professional-looking product in a matter of minutes. The most conservative estimates put Bootstrap at a whopping 52% market share. To say that Bootstrap is the market leader in CSS frameworks would be selling it short.
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