In my previous post, I outlined what Gittr is looking for in a framework and how I’m going to go about finding it. This post is the first of 3 reviews.
Overall
Overall, Bootstrap has met my minimum expectations. I was able to build a good looking, responsive, adaptive, accessible, fast site. But it wasn’t fun. I don’t like their naming conventions much – they’re a little confusing. An example is in the utilities classes. Things like padding and margin have really long class names. A class of pt-sm-3 pt-md-4 pt-lg-5 could probably be taken care of easier with a single CSS Declaration, like .el {padding-top: 1.3rem;}. I’m not a fan of that at all, but it could probably be mitigated with SASS.
One thing I do like about Bootstrap are the colors. It’s pretty easy to get a custom pallett going and really easy to use the default colors in both SASS and in HTML.
Of all the components that Bootstrap does have, it was really disappointing to find they don’t have a toast-like function. Toasts are a part of Materialize and a pattern that I really like, so I’d like that to carry in to our next version. There is a plug-in for toasts, but I really do think it should be part of Bootstrap.
Ranking it against Materialize, here’s a table!
| Item | Materialize Rank | Bootstrap Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 3/5 | 4/5 |
| Filesize | 305kb (2/5) | 188kb (4/5) |
| Components | 4/5 | 3.5/5 |
| Extendability | 5/5 | 3/5 |
| Durability | 2/5 | 4/5 |
| Overall: | 3.2/5 | 3.7/5 |
Overall, Bootstrap gets 3.7 out of 5 stars, or bananas, or thumbs ups, or whatever rating system pleases you. Better than I expected it to. We’ll see how it chalks up to Bulma in my next post. The result for Bootstrap can be found at this link.