Toolkit: A Front-End Framework for the Modern Web

@molona - I’d say that Bootstrap and Foundation are the biggest competitors, simply because the feature sets are very similar. However, I’d say that Toolkit’s unique features (JS classes, CSS namespaces, etc), is what will really set it apart.

When working on Toolkit, I take a lot of inspiration from fellow open source projects and developers. I’m constantly iterating and improving on the code base as technology moves so quickly.

@lukaswhite - I’m actually in the process of a new titon.io design that will be accompanied with a new, more advanced demo system. Right now, the demo is a bit sub-par, but it’s actually the testing suite I use for development, which can be seen here: https://github.com/titon/toolkit-tests

I appreciate all the feedback! I’ll definitely keep it in mind for 3.0.

Nice article…the framework by it selves looks really awesome although the website is just too crowded…hard to find your way around…I can see how it benefits developers searching for a certain functionality although if you see it for the first time…if it wasn’t because of your article I would just close it without giving it much thought…right now I am considering though using it for some smaller project :slight_smile:

Two things,

First I want to thank Sitepoint for publishing this article on Toolkit. I enjoy reading these types of articles.

Second I want to thank the author, milesj for making this framework available to us all and for an outstanding job of writing the article. I fully intend to give this framework workout once a current project is completed. I like what I’ve read and am eager to try out the framework.

Thanks

Steve

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I always say that , “if you spot it, you got it!”

I am very happy to hear about this framework, especially with the customizable integration of the BEM methodology. I’ve been missing this framework for years. @milesj Thank you!

It’s always nice to wake up to an article about a new framework that embraces modularity. I dearly want to try it out in two projects of mine (a WordPress theme and a Ruby on Rails site).

One thing that I do find a bit limiting is the drop downs. It’s a dicey problem I’ve found (as a newbie to front-end development) and I want to support click menus in both desktop and mobile. Not having access to nested menus on mobile feels both good and bad; good, because the typical kind of experience is not great on a small screen, but also bad, because I feel there ought to be a way.

Thank you for including ARIA support by the way. I like a web that’s accessible, and frameworks that support it are great… but I’ll have to test how good it is in Toolkit when I have more time. :slight_smile: At some point I would love to write an article about the accessibility of Bootstrap versus Foundation, and adding Toolkit to the mix is something I look forwards to.

I mentioned Titon Toolkit back in January as one to watch!
http://www.ustesg.com/2015/01/21/top-3-css-frameworks-to-watch-in-2015

Actually, I invited Miles to write on sitepoint about Titon. As someone who cares deeply about frontend frameworks, code bloat and having to follow someone else’s frontend standards, I felt that there is a lot to learn from what he has to say, irrespective of whether you intend to use Titon or not. Not many people maintain an open source software project for that long.

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Very interesting.

I am especially excited with the “decoupling” aspect and I think it could be a new direction for frontend frameworks with better flexibility to offer.

Definitely one to keep an eye for. Thanks!

This is pretty exciting! As I read the article, I was looking for one thing. I have to admit, I have been flabbergasted by the lack of knowledge and interest in accessibility more than ten years into the 21st century. Then I saw it “ARIA support”. Kudos to Miles for this!

Hi thanks for your Toolkit. It looks good. I like the decoupled JS, HTML and CSS. I also like the fact that using it would me an end to the styling wrestling match that goes on with foundation and bootstrap. And flexbox. Buono.

Thumbs up. I’ll try it out.

Looks interesting. Will give it a whirl, but i’m satisfied with Bootstrap at the moment.

Great presentation and Toolkit looks really very promising. But the problem with such tools is that there are plenty of them and the amount is growing from day to day. So some short video tutorials will be a excellent way to get many people involved. Do you plan to do something like this?
Good luck anyway!

Hmmm… one major problem with using jQuery to select by attribute. It’s about 20x slower than selecting by class!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6533285/jquery-select-by-class-vs-select-by-attribute

I like the idea of using attribute selectors since it prevents people attaching styling to them but 20x slower is a pretty massive performance hit :frowning:

@Dan503 - While it is true that selecting via data attributes is slower than classes, the performance is negligible, as most of the selecting/traversing is done once in Toolkit (or very little), while the context is also per element, instead of the document.

Yes, 20 times slower might sound like a lot. But is there really all that much difference between
.0000076 ms and .000152 ms

I think I need to put together my own test that spits out the selection time of jQuery class, jQuery attribute as well as the new querySelector() and getElementsByClassName(); selection methods. That would be interesting.

Maybe a .each() method on 100 elements and a single element. That should show how negligible the selection time is.

Apparently there is no IE8 support, correct? We can’t use it because too many corporate users still use IE8. We have about 30% of our users are still on IE8.

This is an awesome project, milesj: great the idea of decoupling scripts, CSS and HTML, the minimal styling (it reminds me of the approach behind the underscores base theme for WordPress), the concerns for accessibility, even the project of adding a LESS version for a future release! Great job and well-written article.

One small concern for starting to use your framework would be: after taking care of it for so long, is there any assurance that you’ll keep supporting it for at least the same number of years? I know you mention a future release, and I know this is a catch-22 situation: the more people adopt Toolkit the more chances there are that it’ll be fully supported, and the more the chances that it gets supported in the future the more people are encouraged to adopt it.

I wish your framework a great success and will start seriously looking into it for my projects :slight_smile:

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