which tags does the project aim to cover?

[jjb]

There isn't style for many tags, like article, aside, section. would it be appropriate to have style for these, or is that somehow not in line with the goal of the project?

[kylefiedler]

The intended use is with a reset and the reset (we use normalize) should take care of setting those HTML 5 elements. Bitters is meant to act as a starting guide for your project. With the reset you should put it in your project and not really edit it, Bitters you should edit to the projects needs ie change the variables to suite your sites style.

Its a little different than most projects that way. Hopefully the edits I've made to the documentation make this more clear. If not let me know.

[jjb]

@kylefiedler gotcha. Buuut... if it specifies basic style to p and blockquote, why not article?

[kylefiedler]

@jjb The styes for <p > and <blockquote> would be on top of a reset or browser defaults to make them consistent with the vertical rhythm that the rest of Bitters has. Other than displaying article block, which should be in a reset, what other styles do you want for it?

[jjb]

@kylefiedler you made blockquotes grey and indented, which seems to coincide with the purpose of a blockquote. so an article is presumably the main consumable content on a page, which might warrant a slightly bigger font, and a limit on maximum width.

[kylefiedler]

@jjb I think your wording is best; it "might" need those styles. I'd wonder why you wouldn't increase the font-size or have a container for your entire site, maybe use Neat :).

I'm more open to the idea of removing the gray border and indentation on <blockquote> and harping on me for making too many assumptions about that. I believe that its more expected to see those styles on a blockquote than the styles you mentioned above on an article, I'm willing to be wrong though.

[jjb]

if you would remove the blockquote style then i don't know what the purpose of the project is :) maybe that should be established better.

[jjb]

maybe you could elaborate on "consistent with the vertical rhythm that the rest of Bitters has" -- what does that mean?

[kylefiedler]

Bitters is meant to help designers get projects started faster. It adds enough predefined structure and style to get started quickly but not enough to dictate style moving forward.

The spacing around type is based on $base-line-height so as to keep a semi-baseline grid. All sizes are scaled up or down by a factor of .25.

Do those help in anyway with your questions?

[jjb]

I guess I was thinking it would be cool to have minimal meaningful style for each type of element. The style that bitters has so far does go along with this, so I thought some minimal style for other elements might be appropriate.

I guess the larger issue is that the goal of the project is still a bit murky. Those two sentences from the readme don't get us very far. To be clear, I'm not advocating for it to have any particular purpose! Just discussing things...

Perhaps the readme should answer this question: If I've installed bourbon, neat, and normalize, what problem do I have that bitters is now solving for me? Candidates:

1. there is CSS that every project these days that we don't want to retype every time. (problem with this answer: the readme states that bitters should be modified after installation)
2. thoughtbot has an opinion about fundamentals of style
3. thoughtbot has an opinion about how to organize CSS files and their content
4. something else...

[kylefiedler]

I guess I was thinking it would be cool to have minimal meaningful style for each type of element.

I think the best way for us to have that discussion on a case by case basis. I believe some elements don't need minimal style or by adding style you are assuming too much how the element is going to be used. Please make PR with style that you think is missing. I'd be happy to have more in depth discussions on specific examples. If you feel strongly about the articles example I think that would be a good one to start with.

I guess the larger issue is that the goal of the project is still a bit murky.

I hope this is just due to the projects infancy and me not taking enough time on the documentation. Hopefully I can make this more clear as I spend more time on the project.

I think you bring up some great points and Bitters is meant to solve some of those and not some of the others. In general this is meant to update and replace a lot of the styles that were found in Flutie. Its meant so that the start of a project doesn't look terrible but doesn't add nearly as much style as something like Bootstrap. It also speaks to the way that we organize our sass. Everything central to the project should be added to the base folder. A dated form of that thinking can be found here: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/25098505945/style-sheet-swag-architecting-your-applications-styles

Let me know if you have any other questions.