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What CSS Framework Should You Learn? CSS vs Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS

Zahab Kakar on October 21, 2021

Introduction As a developer, we all deal with plenty of recommendations, various options to choose and having no idea what to choose. On...
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frondor profile image
Federico Vázquez • Edited

Personally, I'm a big fan of a clean HTML structure. Tailwind is a mess in that field, and harder to get around with.
I just use my own variant of bootstrap with sass and then pass everything through PostCSS to clean things up and build a slim bundle.

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Zahab Kakar

Yes, you are totally right. Tailwind mess the whole structure and I mention that too, even some people will not be able to read thee code because we use many classes in just one html tag.
Yeah Bootstrap is so cool and I personally used it lot.

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Zahab Kakar

I dont know much about sass yet but thanks for sharing that. It's helpful.

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evg profile image
Evg

You wrote correctly, you need (if the person knows little) to start by learning css. Now, I think, a dangerous trend has emerged. People learn frameworks without knowing what they are using. Learning Bootstrap doesn't know css, that's unfortunate. The fastest investment is to learn the basics of css, html, to freely write something of your own, but then often learn the best approaches in this.

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Ravavyr

it hasn't recently emerged lol....it's been about 10-15 years since people jumped on jQuery without knowing JS, and after that React/Vue/Angular.
Same with CSS it's been Bootstrap, LESS, SASS, SCSS

All these people are pretty much useless when it comes to debugging sites because unless it's built with their tools and stack they can't figure out what's wrong.

Knowing the base languages is best, learning to use frameworks is useful, but should be understood to be secondary to understanding the languages if you want to be a decent developer.
I'm not even saying good or great, that takes attention to detail, great communication, the ability to see the big picture and understand business needs and UI/UX and so on, things that only come with time and experience, and only if you experience the right things.

As a friend once said when i asked him how many good developers there are in the world. "About 5"....the old i get, the more i feel this is true. Note, i'm not one of them, i just fix things.

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Zahab Kakar

You are right!
Maybe becoming a good developer is the most difficult task for a developer.

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zahab profile image
Zahab Kakar

Exactly, the simple path is not always the best one.
Learning fundamentals might take time but it always build basics of learning.

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maxrubino

Many frameworks out there do a nice job. I try more than one but after a while, I quit. I know CSS, why do I have to learn a new form of it? To have a well-designed button? I can save a button that I previously did it.
If I have to write text in orange color, for example, I do like this: {color:orange} or {color:#FFA500}. In Bootstrap I was not able to find a way, besides creating a new class using a custom style sheet that includes... {color:#FFA500}.
I am not criticizing Bootstrap (or any other framework), I just don't understand why to use it if you know CSS. And if you don't know it, better to learn CSS than Bootstrap (or any other framework). Once you have to do a variation will be easy and fast.
Instead, I find it much more useful ready-to-use examples of buttons or animation or other items written in CSS to apply in freedom.
Anyway, that is my opinion.

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vladi160

In Bootstrap u are using the styles that you want, too and there are predefined classes

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Zahab Kakar

Yes, Your style will override the original bootstrap's styles and in your project you will have two styles, and this will decrease the speed of the project. Still as I mentioned, Bootstrap is one of the most popular Framework and it's totally fine to use it.

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Federico Vázquez • Edited

Not really, bootstrap provides sass files for you to override at variable levels. Then you build the version of bootstrap you want

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Michael Andreuzza

learn both, is fun. But CSS first...