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Add to SafariWhen comparing Foundation vs W3Schools, the Slant community recommends Foundation for most people. In the question“What is the best CSS framework?” Foundation is ranked 5th while W3Schools is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Foundation is:
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Pro Uses REMs instead of pixels
Foundation uses REMs instead of pixels, meaning you don't have to state an explicit height, width, padding, etc, for every device. Simply put, using REMs means you can just state font-size: 80%; and have the whole component (and its nested elements) shrink by 20%.
This is great for making your site mobile friendly. There is also a Sass function in Zurb that converts pixels to REMs so if you're used to thinking in pixels, you don't have to learn a different system.
Pro No style lock-in
Styles are purposefully undeveloped to encourage differentiation between different sites using Foundation.
Pro Block grid
Foundation has a feature called block grid. Block grid gives designers the power to divide the contents of an unordered list into a grid that is evenly spaced. Furthermore, Foundation also takes care of collapsing columns as well as removing gutters.
Pro Easy customization
Just by looking at the name, Foundation merely provides designers with a foundation of sorts on which they can build their design. It can be customized easily through SASS, a powerful CSS pre-processor or by overriding the default CSS styles.
Pro Easily extensible with a selection of add-ons
There's a variety of front-end templates, icon fonts, responsive table examples, SVG icons and stencils that help you quick-start or easily improve on your site.
Pro Support for off-canvas navigation
Foundation comes with an easy way of creating off-canvas menus.
Pro Uses Interchange to load responsive content
Foundation comes with Interchange, it makes use of media queries to load images responsively and create content that's suited to different browsers and devices.
Pro RTL support
Allows easily changing text direction.
<html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl">Pro Built-in form validation
Foundation comes with Abide plugin, an HTML5 form validation library.
Pro Good mobile support
Foundation was one of the first frameworks to adopt a mobile-first philosophy. By focusing on mobile design first, Foundation makes designers think on what kind of content is important, relevant and interesting to the users without thinking too much on the space.
Pro Easy to learn
All the tutorials are written in a straightforward and easy to understand way.
Pro Built in editor
Almost every example has a "try it yourself" button which opens up an editor in a new tab. It allows you to play with the example code and see how it works.
Pro Well organized tutorials
All of the lessons are separated into their own pages, which makes it easy to learn about specific concepts.
Pro Great source from Google search's perspective
Cons
Con Can be hard for beginners to grasp
Since Foundation is built to be customizable, it's default style may not be very appealing for most. While it's true that most production-ready websites shouldn't be using the default style of a css framework (they would all end up looking the same), this is even more true for Foundation.
Con Needs more pre-built components
Example would be a scroll-spy not only for one cell, but cell to cell.
Con Not UMD pattern in core
This problem will bring attention when used with Angular, React and other JS framework. It is important to know that they create app version of this framework.
Con Documentation is a bit better than average
Documentation could be written better and clearer, with many more example than they currently have. Sometimes hard to find solutions for detailed css problems.
Con Outdated practices / problem solutions
The practices that are shown to solve the problems at hand are rarely, if at all, updated. Usually, their tutorials and learning material is updated only after they see their profits drop.
Con Doesn't care about teaching right
There are multiple errors in the data they show. Although the solutions they show work, they will lead to unmaintainable code. That happens even when the maintainable code alternatives are as easy or accessible to new programmers as the alternatives.
Con Certifications not recognized
Many professionals in IT agree that w3s certifications are not recognized by them and are deemed useless. Good luck finding any respectable professional that accepts a w3s certification.
Con It is for profit
What defines what goes is and what gets fixed on w3schools is what gives them profit and what doesn't (through their ads system).
Con Written tutorials only
While many learning resources offer a mixture of media in their courses (such as videos, challenges etc.), w3schools offers only written tutorials and code editors. This makes w3schools more beneficial as a quick reference rather than a primary learning resource.
