Is it worth NOT using a CSS framework?

[drizzle]

I’m wondering how many people don’t use a framework such as Twitter Bootstrap?

It seems like a good starting point for all projects since it solves a fair few CSS problems such as responsiveness, layouts, unified type and form styling, basically the skeleton elements that no one probably likes doing… Lately its stagnated for me, using the same methods every time, reusing the same code, hardly writing anything, it takes away the creativity, simply copying and pasting, removing code you don’t need.. and so on..

It seems like doing this from scratch would be a bigger headache, though? Since i could spend more time fixing layout bugs, making sure type is correctly unified across all elements, etc..

Do you start with a clean slate every project? or.. have you developed your own skeleton project? or.. do you use a collective of different skeleton projects available? or.. are you religiously using a specific framework?

[TheDoc]

The company that I work for builds themes for Tumblr, Shopify and WordPress and we’ve developed a skeleton for each. However, the only thing included in the skeleton is the markup and some JS that we constantly reuse (resizing videos, infinite scroll, etc). The CSS that comes with each skeleton is completely blank except for some mixins that we reuse (media queries, placeholders, etc).

I think Twitter’s Bootstrap was a great idea that I think helped confirm/shape some elements that we use today. I don’t think I’ve touched it in a long time, though. Bootstrap 3 RC1 is out now, I might check it out for simple curiosity, but there’s no way I’d use it on a new project.

[Martin Duran]

The start of a new website is my favorite period of development. I’ve coded out my own “skeleton”, and, since I’ve adopted SCSS, do not use frameworks at all all. I think, as does deeve007, they are all bloated. I like to keep a tidy stylesheet, so frameworks are naturally not for me. They are way to heavy for my liking. Do you use Sublime text? If so, you should look into gist. Gist’s allow you to save snippets of code to be quickly re-used. I’ve created a gist that I use for my “skeleton.” My opinion, however, is biased, as I am no fan of frameworks.

[Johnslegers]

I didn’t like any of the existing frameworks out there, so I just created my own framework.

Cascade Framework ( http://cascade-framework.com/ ) combines a very light footprint with feature richness bacause of an ultra-modular OOCSS based architecture. If you only need its core features, you need no more than 2.5Kb of framework code (minified + gzipped).

If Cascade Framework still isn’t lightweight enough for you, there’s now also a light version with 2kb in total. You can check it out at http://jslegers.github.io/cascadeframeworklight/ .

Also, consider that both Cascade Framework and Cascade Framework Light provide out-of-the-box support for responsive design for all browsers that support it, while serving a fully functional desktop version to IE6-8.

I use Cascade Framework as a boilerplate for all my projects.

[Johnslegers]

@deeve007 :

Cascade Framework 2 is under development and involves a rewrite of the codebase to Sass. This will allow you to use the framework in a completely semantic way and select on a per-feature basis what you need.

Still, for a project with a custom look-and-feel, you shouldn’t be using more than 5kb (Gzipped) of Cascade Framework’s CSS code today. That includes IE6+ support, responsiveness and default typography. And then there’s always Cascade Framework Light, which is only 2kb (Gzipped). I would hardly call that bloated.

Given that (nearly?) all browsers now resize the page as a whole, rather than just the text, previous issues with PX vs. % vs EM in terms of accessible font resizing are rather moot. I definitely don’t see any impact on using PX for media queries. Zooming in an out works fine on all browsers I tested.

With regards to font sizes, I decided to use a fixed font size for the body and % based font sizes elsewhere. Old IE doesn’t like % or EM for the body’s font size. Using % everywhere else offers about the same advantages as EM.

[Author]

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