This logs the result of experimenting with Bulma as a styling framework around DomUI.
- Bulma is built using sass syntax. This is not directly supported by DomUI (it uses the scss syntax) so I included the css files instead.
Styling issues
H1..H6 tags are unstyled
All Hn tags have no style at all; Bulma tells us to use its classes to define headers instead. This is plain dumb: there is simply no reason to break rendering of these tags just because you have another idea. It should be fixed by having the Hn tags expose the same styles using class='title is-2'. Or alternatively wrap the thing in a class="content". See the sillyness in https://github.com/jgthms/bulma/issues/433 or even worse: https://github.com/jgthms/bulma/issues/211. The author does not get an important point: his framework is there to help others. Removing all styles everywhere is not helping, it's vandalism.
This might also mean that there is more foolishness than this around. It means that including Bulma fscks up everything else: it's an all or nothing affair.
Buttons
Buttons only work nice when used with font related icons. Buttons with an image inside render badly:
The colors used in button specification kind of suck. "is-white"?
Input controls
Input controls are defined as width: 100%, which results in a screen like this:
While perhaps acceptable on a phone this is bad for any ERP gui, because there is no relation between the #of characters that are needed and the size on the screen. It makes scanning the form very hard.
Inputs also render badly when not contained by some size-restricting container, and especially the has-addons thingy behaves oddly as this does not fill all horizontal space. To get it to do that you need to add is-fullwidth, apparently. This is very inconsistent.
Integration
As it is Bulma cannot just be included as it is too intrusive. We can fix that probably, by cloning and fixing. But we will be at odds with the author who has strong opinions on some things I at least also strongly disagree with 
It might be a bad race.
We also have another issue: to actually make use of Bulma almost all components must somehow "know" of it: some controls might need to render a different HTML structure (like FormBuilder, because Bulma uses different methods to render a tabular like form). More problematic still are the classes used: to style the components add class names to all important constructs so that those can be addressed to style them. How do we change those classes to bulma classes? This also needs to be done depending on the stylesheet used as existing stylesheets all use DomUI's classes. A naive solution would be to give each component a separate "rendering" part which is separate from its Java "interface" part, i.e. a Text control would be a Java part only implementing its Java side of behavior (properties, listeners et al) and another class, created through some factory that changes when the stylesheet changes. This rendering class then renders the actual DomUI structures for the control. While possible this adds a huge amount of overhead in both coding and rendering.
I also thought about using some SCSS/SASS magic to let the existing ".ui-xxx" classes "extend" Bulma classes where possible. But I think this quickly dies...
TODO: Look at Vaadin and see how they handle this.
What IS nice about Bulma is some of the general concepts:
- Using semantic styling like "is-error", "is-primary".
- Using global style modifiers for things like combining elements
- Using flex and/or grid layout to handle responsiveness better.
It might be a good plan to steal the concepts instead of just using the framework?