Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

I would personally like to see a CSS framework that has absolutely zero opinions about design. Meaning, radio buttons are actually the standard html5 radio buttons, but perhaps with titles handled in a unified way that works across all browsers. Form elements are given proper layout CSS that solves a lot of common issues across all browsers but no additional styling is added. Etc. I don't want my site to look like yet another bootstrap site (YABS) and overriding all of bootstrap/foundations/whatever's styles is a huge PITA. I usually just end up rolling everything from scratch for sites where I want full control over the design.

edit: I'll post this as an edit since there are multiple responses referring to http://www.getskeleton.com. Skeleton is similar to what I'm asking for but it seems to have stopped short. I would love to see unstyled carousels, alerts, modals, sticky headers, images with inline comments, etc. Basically, all the really nice stuff you get in Bootstrap and Foundation but without any of the styling.

I think this is exactly what Skeleton tries to be.

http://www.getskeleton.com/

I will say though that Foundation is much easier to customize styles for than Bootstrap, which is one of the primary reasons we now use Bootstrap for internal apps or side projects which we don't intend to implement a custom design, but Foundation for all sites which we plan on designing.

One thing to keep in mind is that Skeleton has not seen a single commit in the past year, so it's not clear if the framework is going to be supported long-term. It's probably better as a blueprint for one's own homebrew minimalistic CSS framework.

It doesn't need to change until flexbox is well supported. I've just used skeleton in a project without any problems.

https://github.com/dmur/Skeleton appears to be a more active fork.

So a framework needs to update every 6 months just because that would make you feel better about it?

Also, your statement is factually incorrect. There was a single commit in the past year. If you had said that next month, you might have been correct.

The author is on twitter...

Doesn't need to be updates for the sake of updates. There are open pull requests and issues.

1) Nitpick about 11 months vs 12 months. Are you adding any value to the conversation? 2) The author being on Twitter doesn't affect the 31 outstanding pull requests and the 52 issues filed against the GitHub repository. Again, I'm not clear what you're getting at.

I'm using Foundation on a project as well and I still find it a big pain to override the styles. I end up writing more CSS to override styles I don't want than I would if I just wrote everything from scratch.

Really? We've implemented completely custom designs on top of Foundation for several sites now and haven't had any problems. Then again, we work to get the layout the way we like it with Foundation before we start designing, maybe that's why.

For us, things like buttons required a ton of overriding with Bootstrap when we customized the button design, but Foundation didn't. We found this largely to be the case because Foundation makes less assumptions about how buttons are styled to begin with. For example, buttons are pretty basic with square corners. If you want rounded corners, you just add the "round" class. If you want buttons with a different radius, you just create your own new class with a specific border radius and add that. Different color? Create a new class with a background color and add that.

What in Foundation did you experience pain trying to override?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned inuit css[0]. It's written by the highly knowledgeable Harry Roberts (aka CSS Wizardry) and it has exactly this goal. All you get is some boiler plate stuff. It's well designed (from a code perspective) and states "inuit.css provides little-to-no design which means no undoing things, no deleting CSS and no adhering to other peoples’ design decisions.". Though I guess it might be one step back from what you want, as you won't really find widgets, carousels or anything beyond very simple components in the framework.

[0] http://inuitcss.com/

I'm working on getting there with axis css. It pushed back the design opinions to a css level and makes them modular and easily customizable: http://roots.cx/axis/

Its early days for Topcoat (thus the lacking docs) but our reset is separated from aesthetic (and layout) so you can run an optimized build that gives you exactly what you describe.

> Basically, all the really nice stuff you get in Bootstrap and Foundation but without any of the styling

Step 1. Include bootstrap.js

Step 2. Don't include bootstrap.css

This doesn't make much sense - because if without bootstrap.css you don't get any of the alignment, grid, button sizing, etc.

I think the OP is referring to all of those things, without the design styling - not the literal styling.

I've used http://unsemantic.com (layout only) and http://www.getskeleton.com (layout and minimal design) with good results.

You might want to look at BEM, it's methodology that telling you how to structure your css/js/markup. http://bem.info/ (developed by Yandex)

Take a look at Nicolas Gallagher's (necolas) Suit toolkit:

https://github.com/necolas/suit

Have you checked out Skeleton? http://www.getskeleton.com/

So basically just a reset.css and a grid (possibly a responsive grid)? That is pretty simple to conjure up.

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