Bootstrap attaining its current level of traction is quite remarkable and a blessing to the web.<p>The idea is taking hold that a web designer doesn't have to build everything from scratch in order to still be a respectable designer. The advantages of drawing upon a standard collection of reusable constructs are becoming clear to designers and non-designers alike. I've likened Bootstrap to jQuery with its wide adoption and plugin ecosystem. We've already seen the Bootstrap community form around the project in a similar way.<p>Writing a layout from scratch is sort of like writing a program in assembly language. That's where I feel like we're still at. I imagine that at one point there were people opposed to high-level languages like C because they abstracted you away from the raw nit and grit. Though you still have to write HTML and CSS with Bootstrap (especially if you want to customize the look), you are abstracted away from the tedious boilerplate code.<p>There are other frameworks in this space but none have inspired so many people to change the way they tackle web design. I look forward to a future where more is accomplished on a shorter timeline, thanks to efforts like this project.
I like Bootstrap but I found it hard to do customized layouts with Bootstrap. This was an issue when I tried to create custom widgets.<p>I consider myself to be CSS illiterate; writing Less mixins from scratch was never an option for me.<p>Then I tried ZURB Foundation . And what I liked about Zurb was its "infrastructure "of SaSS and Compass. I found there is a very vibrant support ecosystem around Sass. There is of-course the Compass, Compass.app , Compass recipes,bourbon-compass, Sassy buttons and more; a lot of useful Sass mixins be found by Google search . I have found Zurb Foundation's SaSS codebase can seamlessly coexist with those other mixins , which allows me to focus on my java /javascript code knowing that the layout will be compatible. I like never having to writ a mixin from scratch; Zurb/sass allows me ti include mixins and merely customize parameters.<p>Zurb may not ship with as many widgets as Bootstrap but once I learned how to layout and style a panel with Zurb and sass, writing javascript code to add behaviors and methods to the panel is almost easy.<p>On the downside of Zurb, there does not seem to be any themes marketplace like those for Bootstrap.
It's funny how the frameworks that came before (skeleton, ZURB, 960gs, etc) are always forgotten. IMO two things made bootstrap successful: 1) the Twitter brand 2) colorful CSS3 buttons
Bootstrap is awesome and popular but let's not forget other two frameworks Zurb Foundation and Skeleton, I've used all three, mostly Zurb lately and can say that you can't go wrong with any of them.
It should probably be noted this article is a year old, especially given the current discussion inside Bootstrap is about removing dropdowns as a core component.