[Qa-debsources] [GSoc] Technology Discussion

[Aaron Delaney]

Hey all,

Firstly I'd like to official say how happy I am to be working on Debian this
summer for GSoc with the great mentors matthieucan and orestis.
I don't think I've mentioned it in qa-debsources yet, so hello!

The purpose of this email is to go over research I've been doing on
different
technologies for use on debsources.

Since the first goal is to make it look reasonable on mobile screens,
the first thing I'll go over is what I've learnt regarding "responsive"[1]
frameworks.

## Bootstrap [2]

Bootstrap is a hugely popular CSS framework built on normalize.css, created
by
Twitter and licensed under The MIT License. Most people are familiar with
Bootstrap due to it's popularity.

### Pros

- Nicely tuned 12 column grid system
- Great documentation
- Huge community resources

### Cons

- Bootstrap is feature bloated and has many parts. However we can use a
custom
  configuration [3] to take out the parts we don't need
- Uses a lot of preset visual styles. This makes many bootstrap web pages
  look similar, although this could be tuned by modifying the SASS variables
  See [3]

## PureCSS [4]

Pure CSS is another very popular CSS library, built by Yahoo and licensed
under the BSD license. It too is built on normalize.css.

### Pros

- Nice grid layout system
- Good documentation which is a little more technical than Bootstraps
- Very minimalistic. This is perhaps the best thing about Pure. It is very
  tiny and also very easy to overwrite styles.

### Cons

- Smaller community than bootstrap
- Grid system comes in different flavors, 5column and 24column. Personally
  I feel 5 columns are too little and 24 columns may be a bit overkill.
  This isn't a big deal really though.

I've researched other libraries too but they didn't seem good enough. I've
listed these here with reasons for my dismissal.

## Skeleton [5]

Skeleton is a nice looking small library built by dhg on Github. I liked how
minimalist it appeared to be. Licensed under MIT.

My primary issue with skeleton is that it's responsive layout system isn't
really that usable. You can't define widths based on screen size, instead
there is a single max width. Once the max width is reached, columns are
layed
out singularly.

## Foundation [6]

Built by Zurb, foundation is an MIT Licensed CSS framework very similar to
Bootstrap. However it has the same cons as Bootstrap, it's quite bloated
and takes over the visual style on the page. It doesn't however have a
configuration feature like Bootstrap, which means we would be locking
ourselves into the full framework.

Okay so that's all I'll cover now, I'll send more technology updates soon.

The main things I'm looking into now are the client side JavaScript
rendering
libraries like AngularJS or React as well as native mobile application
frameworks like PhoneGap.

If you have any suggestions on things to look into for these aspects of the
project please do provide input!

Cheers,

Aaron Delaney
~ devoxel

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
[2]: http://getbootstrap.com/
[3]: http://getbootstrap.com/customize/
[4]: http://purecss.io/
[5]: http://getskeleton.com/
[6]: http://foundation.zurb.com/
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