I linked up Water.css not long ago as an interesting sort of CSS framework. No classes. No <h2 class="is-title">
. You just use semantic HTML and get styles. Is that going to “scale” very far? Probably not, but it sure is handy for styling things quickly, where — of course — you’re writing semantic HTML but don’t need to care tremendously about the look, other than it should look as decent as it can with low effort.
This week I saw MVP.css making the rounds. Same idea. There are a bunch more!
- Water.css
- MVP.css
- AttriCSS
- awsm.css
- Bahunya
- holiday.css
- Markdown CSS
- Marx
- Sakura
- style.css
- Stylize.css
- Tufte CSS
- Tacit
- Writ
- new.css
- bullframe.css
Even Foundation, while being a big honkin’ framework, does some pretty decent stuff classless-ly™.
Somehow related… what about PRINTING web pages correctly? Enter Gutenberg (not WordPress’)
https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg
It’s very useful over the years to me personally :)
Here’s a great site show casing a lot of these minimal CSS frameworks. I would say it isn’t an entirely fair comparison though since some have special features which are not show cased or do not work well with the website.
https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/
Im old and I remember why we started using css in the begining…a separation of structure/content from style. The heavy frameworks seem to have forgotten that, and may as well be using old html styles (if you remember what that is). The whole point was NOT to have to change html to alter style. I can see no need for going completely classless just to make a point, but just like flat file cms’s have reminded us what’s important, these minimal css boilerplates remind us a billion stacked classes is not actually necessary or easier to understand IF your confident with css.
Here’s another good source for finding (and previewing) classless CSS frameworks:
https://www.cssbed.com/
This is very interesting. Together with Web Components, this could be a real solution for simple websites. But I feel there’s movement against classes. Everyone is tired of classes!
I’ve actually preferred classless for a while, especially for simple sites/webapps, and in lieu of a “reset” (if you’re going to reset everything, you might as well give it the desired default style). There are enough semantic HTML elements to handle most cases in simple designs. Then add classes when those semantic elements aren’t enough.
Maybe it’s because, like Maak Bow, I’m old and remember the early days
Started similar type of framework.
Might be very good idea but, needs a way to be disabled on page sections maybe with a .disabled-styles class
The main use-case would be to prevent styling on CMS content
Check out https://jgthms.com/wysiwyg.css/, by Jeremy Thomas, a guy who geeks with CSS, it is the super coolest one I ever saw.
Here is another:
Basic.css https://vladocar.github.io/Basic.css/
Bamboo CSS is also a great classless library: https://github.com/rilwis/bamboo