What does "Free" mean in the context of licenses? Looking at a few of those it appears that some don't actually specify, which is dangerous:
"Because I did not explicitly indicate a license, I declared an implicit copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically assert copyright at any time and demand that people stop using my code."
After 6 month joy and pain, I finally give up using Bootstrap.
It's very obvious that smart people are using BS to build cool site like khanacademy, it's well designed, and it's one of the best CSS framework you can find. But...
But for a CSS beginner like me, it's a bit too magical, I wasted a lot of time debugging, I wished I could conquer the complexity, so I tried for 6 months, and now I give up with regret.
Bootstrap(or maybe I should say CSS frameworks) is slowing down my development for the past 6 month or so, if you are a front-end newbie, be warned!
If you have a few spare minutes of time, I'd be really interested to hear more detail about this - what problems you faced, what you felt was unclear, and what you felt was complex. My email's in my profile if you'd be willing to discuss.
CSS frameworks should be speeding up development, not slowing them down so if there's something we can do to make them more accessible, we should find out what that is!
I think I am now easily annoyed when people trying to hide complexity from me, and their creature does not work out of the box. Which makes it really hard to fix bugs. And just think how cumbersome it is to overwrite all the variables to get a new navbar look!
So now I think I prefer some https://github.com/styleguide/css stuff, plus some really easy to use widgets with good design taste stuff.
Just adding my voice to earlier requests for you to expand on your experiences with Bootstrap. I am more of a database developer and have never mastered CSS. I can hack it, thats about it. My initial thoughts were that Bootstrap is going to solve my lack of front-end programming skills.
I think I am going through the same troubles as you.
What' the alternative? Foundation?
I am going to learn bootsrap because at this point it is the coin of the realm - inspiring other frameworks pros/cons and the # of addons and modifications is just growing too rapidly to ignore.
In contrast to Bootstrap and many other CSS frameworks we tested, Susy really enables you to write semantic, non-bloated HTML which can be strictly independent of the CSS you throw at it.
THIS. I think Bootstrap is great for prototyping & back-end admin UIs that a developer might slap together without a designer, but the sheer number of sites that take user-facing sites to production w/ Bootstrap is disconcerting.
Great list. I really appreciate the graphic used to distinguish platform support (responsive vs not). Much easier on the eyes than a written list of supported screen sizes for each framework.
Would it also be useful to list the underlying language used for each framework (plain CSS, LESS, Stylus, etc) in case you plan on customizing?
Instead, I'd have some indicators of maturity, complexity and such - year introduced, version number, lines of code, documentation quality (okay, the last one is subjective.)
Cool. The grid could give a little more information, though, like last version, if widgets are included and other stuff I can't think of. You could also make the column headers sortable; useful if the list gets longer.
