I take some pride in going against the current tide of thought in most things. This is especially true when it comes to such a trend based industry, such as software development. We suffer from Hype Cycles in a big way.

Currently, in the world of Web Development, the community seems to be uber conscious about the potential over use of Javascript and CSS libraries, with the fear that this overuse is bloating the web. I naturally agree with the core sentiment - having a page that requires several different Javascript libraries makes me wince a little, and other things would need to be considered (what clients will be using this web app, etc) before a decision could be made about these libraries.

However, lots of developers in the community are taking this Kilobyte conscious attitude and using it to put off other devs from using popular and well established libraries.

jQuery

A few months ago it was jQuery, as someone developed a tool that attempted to evaluate if your use of jQuery was necessary - youmightnotneedjquery.com. Unfortunately, this view caught on, and presumably a few poor souls got sucked in and attempted to re-invent a heavily proved and well tested wheel, only to hit those quirky cross browser pot holes that jQuery lets you normally ignore.

Right now, it's Twitter Bootstrap that is getting the attention of the devs that claim to be Kilobyte concious.

Here's the problem. The size argument doesn't stand up in the case of jQuery, or in the case of Twitter Bootstrap. Nearly all arguments that you will see complaining about the size of these two libraries are bogus.

gzip and essential web optimisation

Well, one of the best trends to have ever swept the world of Web Development, was the front end optimisation push a few years ago, driven largely by Steve Souders' fantastic book, High Performance Websites.

Did we forget what we learnt in this book? Remember gzip? The bogus size arguments will always look at the size of the raw minified files. If you are sending these files over the wire in a production environment, you're doing it wrong. All production Web Servers should be sending as much content to the client gzipped. This will significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to go between the server and the client (or "over the wire"):

The above screengrab is from the network tab in Chrome developer tools, when accessing jQuery 2.1.1. The darker number in the "Size" column is what actually came down over the wire - 34KB of gzipped data. The grey number (82.3KB) is the size of the uncompressed file. Gzipping has saved the the server and the client nearly 50 Kilobytes in data transfer.

If, for whatever reason, you can't use gzipping in your production environment, then use the CDN. This will make your site even quicker as visitors to your site will likely have their cache already primed, saving you even more of those precious Kilobytes. And, it will also be gzipped.

Twitter Bootstrap

What's worse is when the size argument is incorrectly used to pit one library against another. I've even seen blog posts blindly claiming that Web Developers should use Foundation over Twitter Bootstrap, because "Foundation is more lightweight". In fact, Foundation's core CSS file is 120KB gzipped, whilst Twitter Bootstrap's is 98KB.

Given that it is so easy to debunk any size arguments, I actually think that our old friend, the Hype Cycle, is playing a part. Could it be that the popularity of jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap has made them uncool? I think it's very possible.

"I don't use Bootstrap. I use Foundation".

Well, in Shelbyville they drink Fudd.

Straplines

My point here is that we seem to have forgotten the point of these libraries - to aid us reduce our biggest cost - development.

Just take the jQuery strapline into consideration:

"Write less, do more".

And one of the Twitter Bootstrap straplines:

"Bootstrap makes front-end web development faster and easier. It's made for folks of all skill levels, devices of all shapes, and projects of all sizes".

Everyone is correct to consider the impact of library sizes, but please take a measured approach in a world where bandwidth is increasing for most clients, and development costs remain high. Real world projects (that are my bread and butter) have deadlines and costs.

Like Hanselman said - "The Internet is not a closed box. Look inside." Look inside and make your own decision, don't just follow the sentiment.