[Owncloud] About Bootstrap and ownCloud

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

I just thought it would be good to make this a public statement/discussion
because the point comes up every now and then. (Let me say in advance that
this is not a set point, but a flexible discussion and your feedback is
most welcome.) If you don’t know Bootstrap, it’s a front-end framework with
lots of preset CSS and JS: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

So why don’t we use Bootstrap as a base for ownCloud design? It would make
everything magically responsive, be compatible and all that, right?

While that might be true, let’s stop and think about this for a moment. I
have the feeling that nowadays people expect that every project or app uses
jQuery, Bootstrap, and some JS framework like Backbone. Not many people
seem to know how to develop with simple HTML, CSS and JS anymore, or it
doesn’t even cross their minds to _not_ use jQuery, or Bootstrap in this
case.

Projects which do not use these libraries do this for a good, or several
reasons: While these libraries might be helpful, they have a lot of stuff
which is simply not needed. Lots of code would need to be reworked. Lots of
elements are already solved in a better way. And the overall performance
might be (not necessarily) slower because of all the overhead (also see
vanilla-js.com ;). It’s essentially a backend change which introduces
little to no benefit, or even decreases the quality of the resulting user
experience.

And specific to ownCloud, I would be very careful about these things at
this premature stage, because the design of ownCloud is still very much in
the works. Not many apps have fully transitioned to what I’d say is the
design direction we’re going for (namely it’s only News and Notes for now,
and even they are not completely finished and working). We still have lots
of JS and CSS we don’t actually use or are looking into abolishing. We need
to transition all apps to »the new style«. We still need to simplify a lot.
We are going for a lot simpler design than the Bootstrap default. We would
need to change a lot, and remove a lot again just to make it look and work
again like it is now – simple, how we intend it.


If you really want to help on the interface & interaction design and
improve how ownCloud looks and works, please see the open interface issues
we have open
https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues?labels=Interface&page=1&state=open

Or do some usability testing yourself to see what issues really come up for
people. I wrote a getting started guide on this at
http://jancborchardt.net/usability-in-free-software#Watch-people-use-the-software

Fun fact: No usability test participant ever said »strange, this website
doesn’t use Bootstrap«. Because people don’t care. Let’s work on real
issues.
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