Okay, let me be slightly more nuanced about that statement: a few years ago Bootstrap had its merits (and I guess it still does). You can use it to quickly whip up a UI. I mean, it looks like every other UI you whipped up, but at least it isn’t totally horrible to look at.

Since I’m a programmer and not a designer, I thought that was handy.

But, Bootstrap has evolved, and so have I. What they offer these days is not only FUBAR, but it’s also dangerous. Let me explain.

I recently started working on a project that uses Bootstrap to da max. I never realised they took it that far (I mean, a class like d-none is handy for quickly hiding something if you’re not using AngularJS) but holy moly.

<div class="pb-0"> to set the padding-bottom to zero? Who on earth needs that? Can’t people write CSS anymore? But, more importantly, this is effectively the same as writing <div style="padding-bottom: 0"> (be it slightly shorter) and I thought we all agreed that that was a Bad Idea ™. You are now officially mixing markup with presentation, and the bleeding framework not only endorses but actively encourages it!

If that’s not bad enough, they offer stuff like d-none combined with d-lg-block. This means the element isn’t displayed, except on large screens. That’s fair enough, it’s no worse than adding your own @media rules to enforce this. What it does encourage, however, is idiots using this to add multiple blocks of more or less identical HTML – one geared towards mobile, the other towards desktop (or tablet). I mean, seriously, that’s not how it fucking works. Write your HTML once, and use CSS to tailor its appearance to different screen sizes.

I can only conclude one thing: Bootstrap has become a framework for amateurs that can’t be arsed to learn proper CSS. And that makes me sad.