Will Bootstrap be dropped?

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In the New Year’s Eve program, Quincy said Bootstrap will be deprecated to emphasize CSS skills. I’m ready to start Bootstrap today. Should I skip it?

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There are tons of websites built on bootstrap and it is not going to disappear overnight. It wouldn’t hurt at all to learn it. You could get a core understanding of it in less than a week.

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learning an extra skill is not bad. Plus, once you master CSS in the coming years, you will look for a faster way of doing repetitive things which will mostlikely lead you to using a CSS framework.

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I think the plan is just to replace the bootstrap lessons with more advanced CSS challenges. It’s still a worthwhile thing to learn.

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Don’t avoid it, but also don’t get reliant on it.

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I agree that Bootstrap is worth learning, but not at the expense of learning solid CSS skills. Bootstrap makes everything easier in a somewhat similar way that jQuery made JavaScript easier. From what I hear (from various blogs and podcasts) is that SASS is the future and will replace CSS, and SASS (a CSS preprocessor) is used by Bootstrap. In SASS you can use variables which is super convenient in avoiding repetitive code.

The more skills the better; it would be wise to understand what Bootstrap does and how it works. Their grid system for example is something you can easily duplicate yourself using CSS.

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In fact, as @Soupedenuit mentioned,you can build your own grid system in CSS yourself and you do it as part of this course…

Udacity’s Intro to HTML and CSS

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 **I'm ready to start Bootstrap today. Should I skip it?**
  • I will suggest that you keep learning it, Bootstrap won’t disappear; at least for now.
    bootstrap v3.3.7 is the actual version and v4 is coming so, that tells you that we’ll have bootstrap for a while and lots of job postings require it: Indeed Bootstrap jobs…
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You should learn Bootstrap, but before that you should learn CSS itself to avoid confusion (at last for me it was very confusing to learn Bootsrap while I had very limited CSS knowledge). If you already have a good understanding of CSS, then I think it definitely would be useful for you to go through Bootstrap challenges.

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Thanks for all the advice. I’ve completed the FCC Bootstrap challenge, simultaneiously using the W3Schools Bootstrap pages as an overall guide. (I’m a gestalt learner who needs the big picture as well the details, so the two in concert work well for me.) I’ve updated my HTML | CSS | Terminal | GitHub | Sublime Text reference chart with basic Bootstrap. That section will grow as I use Bootstrap on the next couple pages of my home-brew web site. I hope to finish the JavaScript/JSON challenges and one project in January. Thanks again for the advice. Any more you want to give will be most welcome.

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Drop it!! A clean set of your own SCSS %extends and mixins will give you the reusability benefits of Bootstrap without the bloat.

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Are you using SASS, one of the other CSS preprocessors, or are you doing your own.

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In my opinion you can learn bootstrap or any other framework but with CSS3 and almost full support for flexbox I would prefer that for most websites you’re likely to encounter. [Caniuse reports][caniuse] 97.38% support with 1.88% of the browsers untracked/unknown.

It reduces the “need” to run something like uncss to strip unused CSS from whatever framework you’re using, I’m particularly interested in this kind of overhead since reading this blog post.

A simple example is my react previewer, check the stylesheet and see how small the CSS is. The HTML should be changed somewhat implement the use of semantic tags of HTML5. And a small edge case problem when using the mobile-mode of the developers tools, it doesn’t (or didn’t might have fixed it locally not sure yet) show both panes when going from single pane to two-pane mode using the sliders.

CSS-tricks has some good resources as usual.

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Thanks. Now that I’ve finished Bootstrap, I’m spending several days widening my CSS knowledge before doing the first FCC front end projects.

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Hi Yoder, I use vanilla SCSS with a super simple Gulp file.

IMO as a teacher and developer, sticking to the core language means that every hour of study is taking your much deeper into your learning path.

Core languages allow you to write clean, tight, reusable code that specifically addresses the project at hand, whereas Bootstrap it is a generic solution - resulting in code which is most often bloated and ugly, with extra markup and hundreds of lines of unused css / js - see @labiej - uncss.

Bootstrap tries to solve every problem in the world - bootstrap.min.css is currently 187 KB!! It’s like hiring a crane to move a stick. That’s insane, and site performance is paying the price.

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Checking it out now…

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Regarding unused CSS, I recently read this (old) article by Addy Osmani. It was a real eye opener.

One example that I expect to be quite extreme is FontAwesome because most of the time you’ll use 5 or 6 icons and a few classes like fa and fa-2x. A quick search report 2565 matches for the pattern .fa* in the minified fontawesome file i.e. 2565 selectors in the CSS file. ( See footnote #1 below for how I did this )

The cheat sheet lists “only” 786 icons (search for &# at http://fontawesome.io/cheatsheet/ and see how many are listed). So there are A LOT of extra selectors you’ll likely not even consider using. For example using icons as bullets for your unordered lists as demonstrated at http://fontawesome.io/examples/

Altogether this will lead to a large relative improvement.

Notes

  1. I ran the command cat font-awesome.min.css | grep -o .fa* | wc -l which gave this number. I’m not certain there aren’t selectors that use more than one class but a quick scan of the files didn’t show such a case.
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Its always good to look at frameworks like bootstrap and foundation .

I applied for a job a few months ago, and they asked me to do a test project using foundation framework. I had to give myself a crash course in foundation and knowledge of bootstrap helped me a lot.

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I’ve gone through all the projects and am currently on the 4th d3 graph. I’ve never used bootstrap. Like others have said, core css fundamentals, particularly flexbox, will fulfill all of your formatting needs. Plus imo, bootstrap looks cheesy and, at this point, maybe a little dated.

Every bootstrap website ever

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I used to rely on bootstrap and I did not know how basic CSS works. I decided to completely stop using bootstrap, and now I can do the same things I did with bootstrap. My suggestion is to not use bootstrap, because using CSS will give you more knowledge of what is going on and allow you to do more customization.