Bootstrap uses classes instead of mixins

[rupert-madden-abbott]

Whilst bootstrap is great, it uses classes instead of mixins, forcing loads of styling classes into our markup.

I'd like to maintain a version of bootstrap that converts all of these classes into mixins. However, this will have two disadvantages:

• Harder to maintain gem as changes to twitter bootstrap will need to be manually converted over
• Not backwards compatible as anyone using the gem will have to switch their class markup over to including the mixins

I'd like to fork this project to base these alterations on but the question is whether to push them back into this gem or release them in an entirely new one. What do you think?

[thomas-mcdonald]

While a solely-mixin powered Bootstrap would be interesting, I don't think it's something that I would merge back into this gem.

As I see it, Bootstrap is a tool to rapid development, and over time much of the Bootstrap layout styling should be merged into your other SCSS files through the use of the mixins currently used to generate those 'rapid development' classes.

For other things, such as the growing design pattern library (buttons, pagination etc.) I see no problem with these remaining as classes.

If you were to convert Bootstrap to be entirely mixins, that changes the emphasis from rapid development to hand picking. You lose the benefit of being able to quickly use the grid since you have to consider in your CSS which column mixins you are including, rather than tweaking a couple of numbers inside your HTML classes. Although this is arguably a more considered approach, it's substantially different to what I feel Bootstrap should be: a rapid development tool.

So yes, I think it's interesting, but I don't think it will live as part of bootstrap-sass. Feel free to work as a fork of the project, however.