Responsive - Out Of The Box

We've been working with a number of responsive frameworks over the past year to hone in what is best in the market currently. I enjoyed the Magento 2 webinar a couple weeks ago, and decided to look through the code and wiki to see what kind of responsive approach Magento2 is taking. It looks like Headjs has rolled out some basic responsive features in their alpha 2.0 release and Magento has just barely made a dent at building some custom responsive into the base css.

I have to suggest that this isn't a great approach... Ideally we need a community driven, widely adopted, and feature rich responsive framework built in. Our group has commited to Foundation 5 after evaluating the major (and some minor) players. We would really like to see Magento 2 roll out with some power built in and highly recommend Foundation 5 get put on the roadmap ASAP.

[brendanfalkowski]

Using any off-the-shelf frontend framework is going to be a misstep. Magento needs to build on and document the patterns/practices already in use rather than adopting somebody else's approach (which moves/changes significantly faster).

There is already a discussion about this regarding Bootstrap: #347

[tim-bezhashvyly]

Agree with Brendan.

Using 3rd party responsive framework will bring lots of unnecessary overhead and will force developers to use this particular framework approach/syntax. We have a good example with jQuery/prototype. However sticking to JS framework is more or less necessary while making a website responsive is much vague subject and can be definitely implemented w/o clinging to a particular framework. This of course does not exclude using some good practices introduced somewhere else.

[brendanfalkowski]

@tim-bezhashvyly makes a good point with Prototype/jQuery. Magento bet on the wrong horse with Prototype, and today most Magento sites launch with two nearly identical libraries because almost no third-party components are written for Prototype today. This creates huge bloat and waste in every site because Prototype can't be extricated.

If Magento goes all in on a frontend framework like Bootstrap or Foundation, it's just dead weight when it falls out of vogue and you have to implement something else on top of it. The crux of modern multi-device frontend development is that it's better to be lean than thick.

[alankent]

It is always a challenge of how modern to go when picking frameworks. Do you make a leap and back the latest technology? Or do you go minimalist and hopefully allow specific sites to bring in their own choice framework with less conflicts? There can also be different evaluation criteria for something like Magento compared to a single site - like how customizable is the UI, does it fit in with the Magento templating/layout approach, and so on. No, I am not saying which way Magento is going here, but yes, it is being thought about deeply and comments on threads like this are definitely interesting reading.

[aepod]

The leaner the core, the easier people can tack on the modification. At the end of the day, jqueryui or whatever you wanted was/is available in the Magento 1.x versions. The difference here is that you will have less crap built in to begin with.
I think its a bad idea to use bootstrap or any of the other frameworks. I really like the lean and mean approach that the 2.x seems to have.

I will attempt to bring bootstrap in on top of the existing 2.0, but I am guessing it will work fairly easily. I will post a status update. I may even try a few different frameworks just to see whats what.

[maksek]

We ended up with introducing Magento UI library, instead of using 3rd party, due specific magento architecture.
I think this topic maybe closed, taking in account it is outdated. If somebody interesting to continue discussions - let me know or create new ticket.