…and Bootstrap
Back in my hackathon days, it seemed that all of a sudden, no matter what the pitch, more and more of them ended their ad hoc tech stack with “…and twitter Bootstrap”, for example you might hear something like, “For my project, I used node, express and Twitter Bootstrap”. Later shortened to just “…and bootstrap”.
Bootstrap in the instance is a frontend framwork. Over the next few years it became the visual language for a lot of startups because of its’ ease of use and allowed developers not to have to worry about the UI as much. I’d say it’s biggest step-up at the time was page layout, and to a lesser extent, its JS library.
It’s killer feature? It didn’t get in the way and may me feel awesome
Even today when you go to homepage it says, “The Most popular HTML, CSS and JS Library in the world” – which may actually true, everyone used bootstrap.
So what happen?
This is only conjecture, but I think it’s a combination of things.
- More options, there are more front-end libraries now then you can shake a stick at
- CSS finally caught up. Grid and Flexbox make layout incredibly easy.
- It feels a little dated and unimpressive given its ubiquity.
And finally what sent me off looking for alternatives:
It feels clumsy given how frontend has moved over to component architecture. Although I hate the idea of tailwindCSS, as I don’t think it handles DRY principles particular well, it feels so much better dealing with style encapsulation with self-contained styles.
Additionally, FOMO! I wanted to see how others approach the problem. There are plenty of alternatives as I have found out. I’m currently giving DaisyUI a try in a project, and so far, it’s not gotten in the way. It’s a good way to start.