About

Kickstart began as "Kickstrap", a tool to extend Bootstrap. The goal was to create a layer where users could write their own customizations and add community extensions. This layer would be separate from the Bootstrap core allowing Bootstrap itself to stay up to date without affecting the project's customizations.

In the third version of Kickstrap, Bootstrap has been removed entirely, hence the renaming as "Kickstart". Kickstart 3 is now its own CSS library.

Why another CSS library?

With the previous two versions of Kickstrap, I became very familiar with the intricacies of CSS and frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, and Bourbon. I noticed the following:

  • Frameworks are huge and slow
  • Difficult to extend
  • Have only one or a few themes. Who wants a framework that makes your site look like everyone else's?

Why aren't your docs accessible

When I wrote the docs, I assumed I would get backlash for not writing aria-this and aria-that throughout the examples. Why don't I do this?

  1. I make the assumption you are a competent engineer who can decide how you want to write your HTML.
  2. The examples are intentionally abridged. I don't always include <body> or <html> and sometimes I write ... to indicate abridged components because, see #1.
  3. Accessibility is an entirely separate world of documentation available in rich detail online. I'm not interested in duplicating it. There is already so much to maintain on Kickstart that I happily choose to exclude it so I can focus on the actual features of Kickstart.
  4. Mingling accessibility documentation with the library's documentation doesn't make the library itself more or less accessible.
  5. Implementation is up to you and accessibility extends beyond the use of HTML attributes. I also don't provide guidelines for principles of design that lend to usability and accessibility.