Do you use bootstrap?

[solidcodes]

Just wondering if the veteran coders here use bootstrap for responsive site projects?

yes or no ?

and why?

Thanks in advanced for your inputs.

[ralph.m]

IMHO, CSS frameworks are like Sirens luring the unwary to their destruction. They are full of complicated bloat that is supposed to make life easier, but from what we see here makes life harder for a lot of people. I always prefer to start with a clean slate—using only the code needed for the current purpose—than have to unravel and refactor a whole pile of mess supplied by someone else.

[solidcodes]

@ralph
very nice input.
So you mean you don't use CSS Frameworks at all?

[ralph.m]

So you mean you don't use CSS Frameworks at all?

Absolutely not. I think they are all junk. For me, the most important part of building a site is the first iteration. That's your chance to get everything lean, clean and efficient. Once you start to modify it later, it's harder to keep the code clean, neat and redundancy-free. With a framework, you are already starting with a ton of redundant code that you have to tweak and modify, meaning that from first base you have a mess.

And because you don't know the base code intimately, you easily get confused about what styles are applying where. People often post here saying their site is a mess on small screens, for example, because the default small-screen styles don't fit with their design. What a mess.

And I think the important thing to be focusing on is leaning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Once you start to use frameworks, libraries (jQuery etc.) and other tools (SASS, LESS etc.) you are creating more and more layers of complexity that have to be learned and mastered, and which offer up more tripwires and failure points. Yes, there are time saving aspects to all of these tools, but is all the hassle really worth it? Not to me.

[Paul O'B]

I'm with Ralph on this and although I admire the work and effort that goes into these frameworks I find that ultimately they slow you down and stop you learning how to do things for yourself. By all means look at the code used and take the bits that you need as there are some very useful snippets in there where a lot of common problems are catered for but you do need to understand the code you are using and how it works in order to be able to maintain and alter it later.

It often seems that the people drawn into using the grids are beginners and the least able to fix them when things go wrong.

You should build your own frameworks/default/grid/reset that you can use as a starting point for a project and be sure that you understand why the code is in place and why you are using it.

Some of the hardest questions we have to unravel on the forums are where grids or frameworks have been used and gone wrong and they end up being almost impossible to fix.

[ScallioXTX]

I would never twitter bootstrap on a public-facing website, for reasons already outlined by @ralph.m ; and @Paul O'B ; , but we do use it for our CRM at work. Which is basically an application for which looks and colors don't really matter, as long as it's clear. Which we found bootstrap is. For sites like that bootstrap is really nice because you don't have to think about stuff like color schemes, fonts, how should the menu look, what to do about tables, etc, it's all taken care of, and the basic bootstrap theme looks very clear IMHO.
So basically, when creating a site where you're happy with the default look of Bootstrap, sure, use it. For any other site, roll you own.