[Owncloud] About Bootstrap and ownCloud

[Ed W]

On 20/03/2013 15:05, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
> Klaas, Danimo, I think your points are good in general. Please keep in 
> mind this discussion is about Bootstrap specifically though. Bootstrap 
> might be the go-to library for website coders who don’t want to invest 
> much into caring about design. But it’s just some predefined styles, 
> it’s far from »the web design framework«. We would need to customize 
> and remove so much that I fail to see the value here.

<tongue in cheek>
Absolutely, there is no way that people using bootstrap could create 
such varied designs as these (linked from the homepage of bootstrap)
http://builtwithbootstrap.com/

With regards to customising, I guess there is a small chance that we 
could look at how these free themes have been created with only some 
changes to the bootstrap input files:
http://bootswatch.com/

And possibly some of these paid for themes offer some inspiration on 
tweaking things further?
https://wrapbootstrap.com/

(Nice lazy loaded images in that last one)

It is also a good time to suggest we ditch jquery? It's just some 
pre-defined javascripts, it's far from a web framework - we could just 
copy out the bits we need and paste those into the scripts which need 
them as we go along? We customise the scripts so much in practice I fail 
to see the value of including them?
</tongue in cheek>

(Please smile, don't take offence...)


> My main point here is that not everything is magically improved by 
> using a library like Bootstrap, and it’s not even a good base. Look 
> for instance at our installation process. It’s so vastly simpler than 
> any other installation process, and it would look and work way more 
> complicated if we used Bootstrap. If we want to do proper usable 
> design, we need to invest more.

I honestly believe you are missing the point. If you want proper usable 
design you need to invest *massively, massively more* if you go your own 
way (*good* cross platform css designs are very hard). The shortcut to 
this tremendous investment is to stand on the shoulders of those who 
have gone before and re-use some well debugged base libraries. There are 
plenty out there, from simple html5 resets, various grid layouts, 
yaml.de is quite nice, all the way up to the fully loaded behemoth which 
is bootstrap

The main reason to critique bootstrap is that it does too much for you 
and you have a small skilled developer base who can turn this stuff out 
without a moments hesitation, and they all pull in the same direction 
and build a small core library of re-usable styles... Given that the 
current situation is every app has it's own css and the main base theme 
has absolute positioned stuff in it, I would say that the current 
situation is pretty iffy..?

However, I believe that the core developers should choose this, not 
idiots like. You need to pick something you are comfortable with for the 
long term.

Good luck

Ed W