CSS Frameworks do comes with an option of customization if you really care about their strenuous size.
In this post I will share my previous experiences while working in a company that din’t care much for CSS at scale.
In start of 2015, I was tasked to work with group of developers as UI engineer.Those developers was pure Back-end developers. They would mostly discuss essays about MVC and services. I started working on an existing web application which was currently in development. I didn’t had any option but to work with in a coding environment where no standard was followed while writing CSS. Although they would avoid writing any CSS style (because to them it was just a toy language), but at times to present their idea they had to come across some sort of layout involving CSS.
What would happen if each person would write CSS (as a toy language) and submit to the main Style-sheet. I would come across fifty shades of blue and 150 variants of submit button. One CSS property would have been superseded by 100 others. Let me tell you another fact about those developers, they love ID selector. Despite telling them that in CSS, ID is heaviest object (as heavy as a hammer, and not to forget that !important which comes in category of heavy values) they would love to start a selector with (#).
Furthermore when it comes to making a site a responsive, developers would throw media queries here and there. Some of them were based on min width, some of them were targeting watches. Pixels, points, ems you name it, every measurement unit in the world were used in style sheets.
I am skipping over the spaghetti HTML section (pastas, salads and mirepoixes).
CSS Frameworks for the rescue
May be I am not able to put the frustration in to words but that feeling didn’t lasted longer as I opted for a well know CSS framework called Bootstrap and Patter Libraries for Redesign. Thanks to Bootstrap that it minimized my effort and with it’s ability to customize it’s grids, color schemes. Style sheets that was falling apart was started to Float. Even though, writing proper html for these frameworks we do come across with either class names which doesn’t make sense or too much of non semantic HTML div’s but the HTML 2.0 was much more readable and manageable now.
Implementation of Pattern Libraries made it a lot easier in future projects to present ideas.
I do not know how we survived with first design, but I still hate to peek at the old code.
I shared my story why don’t you fill the bellow comment box to share your experiences with CSS Framewroks.