I agree with you in many points
Thank you for the post.
I would go further and say “use no framework”.
I’m a big fan of frameworks and we made the whole experience in the last
years from less to sass from bootstrap to foundation, to our own
framework …
But there is no fitting css-framework for Neos.
Most of the Frameworks are designed for websites not for applications.
Those framework who are designed for applications are often too big or old.
In my opinion the Neos CSS should focus on three things.
First it has to coexist with the website-css.
Because we could not rely on modern techniques like shadow-dom for the
next three(?) years , we have to prefix every class and only use the
opt-in techniqe for styling. The biggest feature of CSS, the “cascading”
turns in one of the biggests problems of advanced websites and web
applications. funny, isn’t it?
Most of the Frameworks don’t reflect this need.
Second, Neos doesn’t have a lot of elements. For what do you need a
framework? The two forms and headlines are easy styled with your custom
mixins.
The biggest problem is to style 3rd-Party components like jQuery UI.
On that topic no framework can help you.
Furthermore, almost no framework addresses accessibility issues.
We colud use for example Brics (a framework I didn’t know until one
hour) as a starting point, but move quickly to a neos framework with a
good own documentation.