Foundation
Framework
Foundation is a responsive front-end framework. Foundation provides a responsive grid and HTML and CSS UI components, templates, and code snippets, including typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface elements, as well as optional functionality provided by JavaScript extensions Head over to the Foundation website, and you can’t help but notice the byline: “The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world.” At first glance, it looks like a tall claim to go with a marketing campaign.
However, adherents of the Foundation framework know there’s at least some truth to that. Foundation was developed to go naturally with the Rails framework, and several of the Rails’ “zen-like” guiding principles can be seen at work.
For instance, if you wanted a row that contained two elements on small screens, three on medium, and four on large ones, the equivalent code in Foundation will look like this:
<ul class="small-block-grid-2 medium-block-grid-3 large-block-grid-4">
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
<li><!-- Your content goes here --></li>
</ul>
As compared to earlier Bootstrap versions, I find this very intuitive and easy to memorize. No more twelve column grids and figuring out what 4/12 is supposed to be!
While Foundation is much less popular than Bootstrap, it’s a trade secret for many expert front-end developers.
Pros of the Foundation Framework
Foundation has some unusual characteristics out of all the CSS frameworks we are going to consider in this article:
Full tooling: It’s technically wrong to say that Foundation is a CSS framework. I mean, it is, but it’s been built as a large and modular collection of tools that aims to solve almost all kinds of front-end problems. There are separate framework offerings for websites and emails, heavily optimized for their respective domains. Foundation also comes with a command-line interface (CLI), which will sound like music to the ears of developers used to working with Webpack or other module bundlers.
