I second foundation, did two big projects with bootstrap and it kept getting in the way of what I wanted to do.

I've now done two sites with Foundation and it's my new standard, way more designer friendly and always feels flexible.

I'm starting a new project and I've been thinking about Foundation for a while, I'm going to take your recommendation and go with it. Any major differences between Foundation and Bootstrap that might catch someone coming from Bootstrap out, or is it plain sailing?

The only downside is the javascript libraries are a bit underdeveloped and lack the large OSS-community scrutiny that Twitters benefits from.

But the basic stuff is pretty similar, so it's easy to switch.

I actually started a project with Zurb, and switched to Bootstrap, because it offers a bit more, and looked a bit better out of the box. I think Bootstrap has more momentum, which can be important for these kinds of things.

One of the guys who built Bootstrap actually built Foundation previously when he was at Zurb. Blanking on his name right now.

As one of the designers behind Neat, I like what Zurb have been doing with Foundation, but I'm not entirely fond of their semantic grid framework. Many decisions have left me scratching my head and wondering if there wasn't a better way to do things (innerRow() and mobile[...]() mixins are some of these).

One of the things I like about Foundation is their nested column syntax. I don't have to worry about how many columns I have to work with.

In Neat I have to write something like: @include span-columns(4 of 8); If I'm in a div with @include span-columns(8);

In Foundation I always just allocate 12 (default) columns no matter where I am. Shown here: https://gist.github.com/3009035

This makes the css much more reusable.

Neat looks like a nice, lighter weight alternative to Foundation, but I can't switch for this reason.

Fair enough. Until we come up with a better way to detect nested columns, I don't think explicit nested rows is the route we want to take. Our primary goal is to use as few mixins as possible to achieve proper nesting.

Foundation does seem really cool but there's a lot of little things that kind of bother me. Take a look at their "tabs" documentation (http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/tabs.php). Is a <dl> really the best element for tabs? The markup also has to link to "#about" to activate the content in <foo id="aboutTab"></foo> which is the opposite of what I've been doing all these years, <foo id="about"></foo> should be what it links to. Maybe I just worry too much.

One annoying thing about Zurb, it overrides the default styling of forms!

I find that really annoying because sometimes you want to use something like formtastic, which works by add a class name on the form element, but won't work because zurb has overridden the default style. Twitter bootstrap does not do this.

I love the grid layout on zurb. It stretches to fit the width for tablets and phones. With bootstrap, the stretching happens only on phones.

Good and bad on both frameworks.

Foundation looks great but it seems I'd need an entire ruby stack to use the SCSS features? Am I misreading something?

It depends on compass, so yes. I haven't found an isolated SCSS subset.

I still don't quite understand what exactly compass does.