Well, μ- is a million times bigger than p-. But last time I looked <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45163827>, Pico CSS was 83 kB—nowhere near as small as that name would suggest, either.
Just checked - now the homepage of the BBC on load has a transfer of 1.5MB with 5.7MB of resources, and once you've scrolled down the page for the lazy loaded images those figures are 2.9MB and 7.2MB respectively.
I used chota.css (https://jenil.github.io/chota/) in the past to build a couple internal sites for my then-employer. Only ~3kb compressed! And the name stays relevant-ish because it means "small" in Hindi...
Edited to add: it's not classless though. Marx would disapprove.
I love classless CSS for rapid hand prototyping. LLMs are making this increasingly less necessary, but it's still great for creating tiny, performant CSS pages and some of the smaller ones can even be inlined in fewer bytes than it takes to make a 2nd round trip to the server to check if the asset has been updated. This is one of my secret weapons for creating web apps that load and render so fast you can feel the difference!
Interesting. Having made websites I think "of course that makes sense!". As a practical matter, getting wanted page appearance can require adding a few classes. I've been guilty of class proliferation caused by perfectionistic tweaking of things to the last nanogram. Anymore I strive not to go there.
Love the idea. It's really painful to cycle through every theme. Would be great to have a way to scroll through them directly, though... that would result in a bigger bundle, and I respect the hustle
I was very curious for the reason and I found it. Cssbed is not hosting css files but loading upstream css and https://vanillacss.com/vanilla.css has been hacked/hijacked, so no css is being loaded but HTML full of crap.
I thought if request origin or content-type was stylesheet no href GET should be triggered (maybe src) but looks like full HTML site is being rendered behind the scenes of a simple css request.
I had a server-side app made for personal stuff, and pico.css drop-in is a pretty good baseline for an usable UI/page. Also visited some web hosts and their sites look perfectly serviceable with Bootstrap. I think it's a good way to railroad some of the more egregious things LLMs might do with regards to CSS.
I understand the "starting point" part but I find the emphasis on "classless" interesting: you basically have to introduce a non-element selector as soon as you want make even the smallest layout change.
For anything beyond a single page document, I find something like matcha.css (https://matcha.mizu.sh, you can even pick your custom build on the same page) a practical starting point if you want to stay close to the elements.
I tend to start a project by making a classless stylesheet of sorts to set a baseline for the theme and branding.
Its almost never all you need for an actual project, but it is a nice starting point to get the basics in place.
I find that I look at the endless list of classless stylesheets shared online as a starting point, most have at least one or two interesting tricks worth borrowing. I don't find using the off the shelf ones particularly useful though, it ends up with a very generic look to it like the old default bootstrap site or newer default tailwind site.
/* define layer order. Not necessary here */
@layer pico, nils;
/* import framework into layer */
@import url("pico.css") layer(pico);
/* define own styles in own layer, they have precedence. CSS vars are still global. */
@layer nils {
p:first-of-type {
color: green;
}
}
Eye opener. I think I looked through almost all of them and none got basic typography right such as less margin bottom beneath a heading (to the paragraph following it) than above.
Not only that, but very few of them differentiate between a visited link and an unvisited one. I noticed this immediately when clicking through the list of themes and getting no visual indication of which ones I'd already looked at.
OP frankly can't be a serious dev with results like these. It's most likely slop. This looks like a CV project to impress some HR Karens with HN/github clout, to land a job as an AI meat proxy...
I have not written any CSS from scratch since years. Does normalize.css/reset.css are still viable and used? I use Tailwind because of components design, so I wonder what actually current trends are in context of small/alternative CSS solutions.
Resets are still viable. They've become shorter over the years as css has advanced. Obviously if you write Tailwind you don't need a reset.
For small/alternative stuff, since nesting/has()/ field sizing and such is native now there's not much to do there, so what's mostly relevant is some classless sheets like what this article is about.
nilslindemann | a day ago
robertclaus | 22 hours ago
jimmydoe | 20 hours ago
steezeburger | 20 hours ago
lofties | 20 hours ago
We have different definitions of lightweight it seems like.
chrismorgan | 18 hours ago
frereubu | 15 hours ago
frereubu | 9 hours ago
ctippett | 15 hours ago
shrikant | 11 hours ago
Edited to add: it's not classless though. Marx would disapprove.
sphars | 23 hours ago
https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/
e12e | 23 hours ago
But might be due a revival on the shoulders of LLMs.
ivanjermakov | 23 hours ago
szmarczak | 22 hours ago
maxk42 | 22 hours ago
jrapdx3 | 22 hours ago
matthova | 22 hours ago
edflsafoiewq | 21 hours ago
thih9 | 18 hours ago
IMHO today dark mode support is part of reasonable defaults.
etatester | 17 hours ago
TZubiri | 17 hours ago
It's not that complex, there's some minimal frameworks here with 10kB of css code, it's ironic.
small_scombrus | 17 hours ago
Like w3, the makers of the web accessibility checklist have a flash-bang of a website and noone appears to have cared enough to fix it
Yokohiii | 12 hours ago
testerius | 7 hours ago
kdkekxjjexnek | 7 hours ago
nottorp | 7 hours ago
Thank you for not caring about my battery.
zenoprax | 18 hours ago
All the others are as you'd expect.
n3storm | 10 hours ago
I was very curious for the reason and I found it. Cssbed is not hosting css files but loading upstream css and https://vanillacss.com/vanilla.css has been hacked/hijacked, so no css is being loaded but HTML full of crap.
I thought if request origin or content-type was stylesheet no href GET should be triggered (maybe src) but looks like full HTML site is being rendered behind the scenes of a simple css request.
needfish | 18 hours ago
shikwasa | 17 hours ago
For anything beyond a single page document, I find something like matcha.css (https://matcha.mizu.sh, you can even pick your custom build on the same page) a practical starting point if you want to stay close to the elements.
_heimdall | 10 hours ago
Its almost never all you need for an actual project, but it is a nice starting point to get the basics in place.
I find that I look at the endless list of classless stylesheets shared online as a starting point, most have at least one or two interesting tricks worth borrowing. I don't find using the off the shelf ones particularly useful though, it ends up with a very generic look to it like the old default bootstrap site or newer default tailwind site.
nilslindemann | 9 hours ago
mikae1 | 16 hours ago
Many had zero left/right margins on mobile.
Overall terrible defaults.
dematz | 7 hours ago
mikae1 | 5 hours ago
boxed | 15 hours ago
ctippett | 15 hours ago
thiht | 11 hours ago
stymaar | 9 hours ago
> Classless frameworks are not just for communists. But I imagine communists would enjoy them even more.
toymin | 9 hours ago
newsy-combi | 5 hours ago
droidjj | 8 hours ago
bryanhogan | 8 hours ago
It includes a setup for simple plain CSS that can scale. It's split into a reset.css, var.css, global.css, util.css and markdown.css.
Using that approach for this Astro Starter Template: https://starter.bryanhogan.com/
I describe the setup in more detail here: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/css/css-setup/
testerius | 7 hours ago
drewbitt | 7 hours ago
For small/alternative stuff, since nesting/has()/ field sizing and such is native now there's not much to do there, so what's mostly relevant is some classless sheets like what this article is about.
CSS in JS is also still a big thing.
fabiofzero | 5 hours ago
newsy-combi | 5 hours ago