Thu Apr 14 2016 15:14:36 EDTfrom IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored1. Must be well-establihed, well-supported, stable and LONG TERM VIABLE.
For the JS stuff, I think this is JQuery. That is well established and well supported, as it seems.
For the html/css stuff, I am not yet clear what long term viable might mean. I see two possibilities:
a. A Full blown framework that is huge and hip now, that seems well supported and established. Then they release version x+1 and overthrow all of what they did in previous releases, so that you need to port all the shit to the new well supported and well established framework. I have some friends in web development/design, they have to maintain some sites which have grown so huge, that it is not easily or for a reasonable price possible to upgrade from framework X to X+0.5. For example Joomla, that has been well-established, well supported and it looks long term viable, but not when you actually have to maintain a complicated site with lots of modifications and personalisations. Scriptaculous looked good once, it still gets some error fixing updates now and then, but basically it is dead. AOL is dead, geocities is dead, things on the internet die and we can not infer which system will survive how long. Even jquery might die this winter.
b. A minimalistic framework that consists of some basic browser normalisation css, some responisveness css and html and a few things that make life easier for us. But that are so simple and smart, that a person with a bit of html/css knowledge can understand why it does what. Without additionally dive into some js hell which pushes containers around.
I think I am more in favor of b), but we can handle this empirically: In the summer holiday, I will try to build a dummy citadel layout using some frameworks, hello world style, and then we can see how much additional knowledge they require, how big their foot print is and how easy they can be applied.
2. Must not require any runtime language other than _javascript_.
This goes without saying.
3. Flexible layout -- I want it to seamlessly reflow properly on small/mobile devices.
This too. I think all of them are supporting mobile now. It is as mandatory as it once was to have a rotating skull gif and fugly tiled background. What I am worrying about is retina/3k/4k/5k/above. I am not sure if any of them has a plan yet.
4. License compatible with our existing code base.
Which licenses would that rule out?
I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in supporting outdated browsers. Right out of the gate I'm thinking the minimum required browsers will be: IE 9, Edge 13, Firefox 44, "Chrome 47, Safari 9, Opera 36, iOS Safari 8.4, Android browser 4.3, Android Chrome 49. This gives us reasonable HTML5 support, and also support for data: URI's, which are something I've come to love recently.
Yeah, most of the bigger frameworks seem to agree with that.
