Reply To: Your Thoughts! Bootstrap 3 vs Foundation 4

[g.en.e]

While browsing the net for some advanced topics I stumble upon this thread by accident and read something that really gets me on fire… Dave’s advice and ppl like him do not get it, period! I myself just left a company that is building large complex business apps only; One of my most gifted collegues there had the same absurd ideas in his furhter more pretty clear mind. I’ll try to shed some light on the subject in the hope these kind of sounds will die here and now….

Foundation 4 vs Bootstrap 3:

Purist/architectural point of view:
– Foundation 4, hands down. The why:
– Better semantic approach, less div/section clutter.
– Bootstrap follows its foundation, but not quite yet.
– Haven’t gone into the framework as much as I did BS, but probably ‘lighter’ for the render engine due to support for css3 spec following browsers only.

Commercial point of view:
– Bootstrap 3, hands down. Forget BS 2.3+!! The why:
– Bootstrap 3 community efforts shed a big shadow on F4. Ready made full themes, control libs, etc.etc. You’ll have difficulty to choose which. Might be said this is currently more so for V2, but since V3 is only 1 month old, the machine has to still gain its momentum.
– Bootstrap 3 supports IE7 which should be dead, but will live on (3-10% dependent on area or niche) for yet another year.
– Bloated??! The opposite! For real world, non bootstrappy layouts, there’s too much to do yourself as it is. It’s only bloated for those who will not get into the inner workings of the system. Once aquinted with the framework, you’ll include/exclude/override any behavior easily, plugging only what needed.
– Homebrew??! Do not let me laugh; Yes, static ‘print-like’ sites I can see. But it’s 2013 and the web needs responsiveness, kick-ass UX and more. That my friend only the greatest of developpers will pull off by themselfs, in a raid that consumes the available time and budget by factors. Did I mention the after phase where ur customers do the field testing in the wild? OMG

Furthermore there is a missing building block when adopting BS of F4; They rule the statics, media-dependencies, but don’t provide dynamic behavior. jQuery led the way to again appreciate the awesome javascript language; It was never broken, but was doomed to live a life in a world of too many dom engines not abiding the incomplete specs. But now jquery is simply too low an abstraction to directly use for that UX we need. If you’re up to it, there is only but one prefect solution there: angular. Should you like the lesser architecture, you could go the knockout route, fueled with backbone or homebrew to supply SPA tech.