Bulma vs Material Design: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Bulma and Material Design
Bulma and Material Design are both popular frameworks used for building responsive and visually appealing websites. While both frameworks provide a set of UI components and leverage modern web technologies, there are several key differences between them.
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Flexbox vs. Grid System: Bulma primarily relies on a flexbox grid system for building layouts, offering flexibility and ease in creating responsive designs. On the other hand, Material Design utilizes a 12-column grid system, allowing for greater control over the layout structure but with a slightly steeper learning curve.
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Styling Approach: Bulma follows a more minimalistic and lightweight styling approach, keeping its classes and CSS file size relatively small. Material Design, in contrast, provides a more opinionated and highly detailed visual language, resulting in larger file sizes and a more comprehensive set of predefined styles.
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Customizability: Bulma offers extensive customization options, allowing developers to easily modify colors, typography, and other aspects of the framework to match specific brand requirements. Material Design, while providing some customization options, maintains a more standardized and consistent visual style across different applications.
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Accessibility and Standards: Material Design places a strong emphasis on accessibility and adhering to web standards, ensuring its components are keyboard-navigable, properly labeled, and meet accessibility guidelines. Bulma, though not lacking in accessibility features, may require some additional efforts for meeting specific accessibility requirements.
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Documentation and Community Support: Bulma has a well-organized and comprehensive documentation, covering all aspects of the framework in a user-friendly manner, making it easy to get started and find solutions to common issues. Material Design, being backed by Google, benefits from a large community and extensive resources, including detailed guidelines, case studies, and design tools.
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Browser Compatibility: Bulma is designed to have good browser compatibility, supporting modern browsers and providing fallbacks for older ones. Material Design, owing to its reliance on some newer CSS techniques and web APIs, may require additional polyfills or alternative approaches for proper compatibility on older browsers.
In summary, Bulma stands out for its flexible flexbox grid system, minimalistic styling approach, extensive customization options, and comprehensive documentation, while Material Design excels in its opinionated visual language, adherence to accessibility and web standards, strong community support, and detailed design guidelines.
