Experience with Bootstrap 5
27 Feb 2025
Intro
After working with the UI framework Bootstrap 5 for about one and a half weeks, I’ve had some thoughts about my experience. Now this is my first time ever working extensively with any UI framework. I’ve dabbled with Materialize CSS and REACT in the past but I was never forced to only use the framework’s features over using basic CSS. I think that’s what my main problem was. Bootstrap 5 while certainly being beneficial in some cases, was very limiting in its built in styling if you had to only rely on it and not use any of your own CSS styling.
Positives
Building different parts of a website is one thing but implementing all of them together in a cohesive manner can be very difficult and tedious. In terms of editing the sizing, margins, and padding of elements Bootstrap 5 is very useful and well designed. It’s very easy and simple to tweak all of these things right in the class attribute. In fact the whole way in which you specify things using the class attribute is well thought out and quite enjoyable to use. Icons are also another convenient feature that Bootstrap brings. Without it, you’d have to actually download an image file and depending on what kind of file type it is, doing something like changing its color could be challenging.
Negatives
Something pretty basic that I found lacking with Bootstrap 5 were the color and font selection. They very limited in size so having to only use them didn’t allow me to edit those details in the exact way I wanted. I would have liked to just using normal CSS styling to do those things. Implementing something like a navigation bar was interesting because in some sense doing so with Bootstrap is definitely easier but I found the general architecture of it to be rather confusing. There were too many different ways you could choose to nest different <div>s, <nav>s, <ul>s, and s. Maybe that might actually be a strong suit with the freedom and flexibility it provides but in that case the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining all the possibilities and intricacies of how different HTML elements will react with one another. This might also not have been a problem if the navigation bar worked in some way regardless of the specifics but a lot of the times I couldn’t get anything to show unless I did things in a particular order. Which just left me unable to grasp how all of it actually worked together.
Conclusion
UI frameworks can definitely be useful. In fact they are probably necessary to use in some capacity for higher quality and more professional level works. But like anything else, they can have strong points and weak points. So the freedom of not using it is crucial to someone’s coding experience. I definitely think similar to learning and getting comfortable with different coding languages, strengthening familiarity with frameworks can be a huge boon.