It's 37 lines of wrapper CSS. You don't need a library with a cute name and a package manager and an HN thread and a fucking logo to do something that you can replicate in a minute.
Imagine someone posting a repo of their alternatively-named C integer typedefs on here.
nt
An integer framework using stdint.h
Simple
It's just a header file
Light-weight
It's like 10 lines
Flexible
You can do anything
...
#include <stdint.h>
typedef int32_t nt32;
...
How is that a problem again? You find it overkill and ridiculous, OK, but how is that a problem? Just download the file the way you want and you can forget about all the trauma you encountered when you had to see a logo
That I shouldn't need to install NPM or Bower to download a fucking half a Kb of CSS is what is the complain.
It's a clear sign of people with no clue about proper software engineering, which is glaring in today's front end world where dependencies and tools have gone amok to manage mere hundreds lines of CSS or Javascript.
Just provide a download link to the min file and be done with it.
Wow, check your anger and your prejudice. Yes, the site could do with a clear link to the source, but most software engineers are familiar with the 'github-link-in-top-right-corner' pattern, so it shouldn't be a problem even if you're ideologically opposed to using more robust alternatives.
"All these bloody young people don't respect my JAVA Enterprise BSServiceFactoryFactory experience".
Similar to the prejudice that every high-level programmer from so many idiot low-level programmers who think because they mess about with pointers all day they are "real" programmers.
Providing an option to install with npm simply makes it more convenient for those devs who already use it - which surely is not an insignificant number. Nothing is requiring you to work that way or stopping you from downloading the files manually.
I just started to use npm (and indeed package managers in general) for my work recently and it's opened my eyes. It makes sense to me that this will be the preferred way of working for every dev/designer. Just as we mostly all use git now. It's hard to imagine that time when we just shared files via FTP and didnt use version control. I'd encourage anybody like me who was resistant, or working on a large code base that doesn't use those tools - give it a fair try on a side project.
> That I shouldn't need to install NPM or Bower to download a fucking half a Kb of CSS.
And if you entire dependency chain for your project is half a Kb of CSS that's a valid point, I'd like to see that project though.
Dependency management for front-end/browser assets is sorely needed, the problem at the moment is that we have too many of them and no clear standards have emerged yet, npm/require() is as close as we've got though and I'll take it for now.
I have a lot of dependencies. Sometimes they have dependencies. Being able to update them all at once is great. Same reason I like apt, yum and the various app stores.
Some of the times. What I am bitching about is that I can't get around NPM/Bower and other bullshit, I have to use it for a lot of these libs, regardless of me needing them.
I am the only one who should judge what are the best practices for the project I am working on, not some clueless Javascript hacker (cheap shot I know). What I'm complaining about is that front end "developers" seem to all be unaware of a few staple principle of software engineering: keep it simple and right tool for right job. I've used NPM, Bower, Gulp, and others, when it was needed but from over a decade of experience in the web I can assure you that 90% of the time, it's superfluous.
It generates developers who don't know how their own code works or interact, and who for the major part end up over engineering everything they touch for no goddamn reason.
Plus I always end up spending more time dealing with those stupid tools than coding, and if Java taught me anything it's that this is the clear sign of a very ill and insane dev culture.
> What I am bitching about is that I can't get around NPM/Bower and other bullshit, I have to use it for a lot of these libs, regardless of me needing them.
You do realize that downloading the CSS/JS for these libs is trivial, nothing is forcing you to use Bower/NPM/<insert lib management tool here>.
I've often wondered why this sort of overengineering, excess, and heavy "preaching" of "best practices" is more prevalent in some software ecosystems than others; the best hypothesis I can come up with is that it happens because the barrier to entry is low and the problems to be solved are easy, which encourages people to add complexity until it's not. Furthermore, the simplicity causes opportunities for something like a religion to develop: you don't have to think, just believe and follow. It's cargo-cult. Some fact that worked for someone gets parroted as "best practice" and then, despite how suboptimal it could be for them, others pick it up and think it's the "best" solution, and it works for them, propagating the belief. There's little questioning, because those who believe don't themselves actually understand enough to.
In this case, I too have to question the NPM / Bower (yes, it's optional, but IMHO shouldn't be needed). The CSS file is basic flexbox. I think it would be a bit embarrassing if you were a web developer, and had to npm / bower a library to avoid writing trivial flexbox CSS.
This isn't a complicated, full featured grid... those definitely need dependency management.
If you are new to flexbox, the CSS file is a helpful demonstration I guess. Flexbox is way more powerful, and far more flexible, than this grid alone though.
> I think it would be a bit embarrassing if you were a web developer, and had to npm / bower a library to avoid writing trivial flexbox CSS.
Why does everything have to be this huge library to be used? Why can't I pull in 30 small libs that composed? I'm a Node.js developer, our ecosystem is built around small focused modules that do one thing and one thing well. Sometimes you can write the 1 line yourself, or pull in a module and know that if anything changes that could affect that line of code, someone somewhere will notice it before you and update the module. Congratulations you just saved yourself hours of debugging because someone else did it for you.
Libraries always are a trade-off between the flexibility of developing it yourself versus the time saved relying on other people's work. To me, it's less the size of the code than the functionality that matters. Code size is not necessarily an indicator of how hard it is to solve a problem after all.
In this case, however, we are talking about pretty basic CSS. There are some standards for page layout, but there is no One True Way to design a web page front end... all designs are different. Small CSS like this (as a library) in effect make design decisions for you and I don't think CSS is difficult enough for this to be justified.
As an example (without manually editing the CSS at least, which defeats the point of the NPM / Bower installs), this grid CSS locks you in to arbitrary divisions of 12. What if your grid requires 5 evenly spaced columns? You can't do that.
> I don't think CSS is difficult enough for this to be justified.
YOU don't think it is. Neither does my buddy who works in CSS/SASS, but I do. Because I don't do styling. I'm mostly a backend developer.
> What if your grid requires 5 evenly spaced columns? You can't do that.
I just did it easily by 5 elements and putting them as `-fill`. 5 evenly spaced columns. I wouldn't have been able to do that without this lib because I don't know CSS that well, nor flexbox. This library just saved me tons of time, just to do what you said it can't.
Its still a case of copypasta, and is reminiscent of the cowboy PHP development prevalent during the early 00s.
Granted, in this case the library is exceptionally lightweight, but its still a 3rd party dependency and should be treated as such. It still gets injected into the codebase at the end of the day, and can be vendored if required.
funnily enough those new devs, so imbued in their 'best practices', commit the dist of their project on github so at least is dead easy to work around the damn 'I depend on an application being installed globally' pattern
So beautiful to hear someone else say it. I've been feeling this way for a while. Besides, there's really nothing critical in my HTML that's going to require updates. What's the last remote root discovered in Bootstrap? What's the last use-after-free found in FontAwesome?
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/1000ch/grd/gh-pages/dist/g...
I'm honestly not seeing what is there to complain about.