audience-minutes VS mvp

Here's my personal goto:

Find some minimal CSS framework. My preference is Skeleton [0] or Bootstrap [1]. The key is just finding something minimal that works without too much fuss. Personally, I rather have a minimal framework provide 'responsiveness' so I don't have to worry about it but I also want it to get out of the way of anything I do.

Use JQuery [2]. Don't rely on CSS for animations or interactivity. In theory CSS does a lot. In practice it's a nightmare to use and to get it play well with whatever else I'm doing in the page.

Write in "bare" HTML and "vanilla" JavaScript. Don't use a static site generator and don't use a JavaScript framework.

Port in JavaScript libraries as needed. Some of the ones I tend to use are numeric.js [3], downlaod.js [4] and audience-minutes [5]. If you're doing spreadsheet things, maybe there's some JS package out there that will help.

Doing "raw" HTML/"vanilla" JavaScript makes me effectively unhirable but for limited scope side projects where I have full control and want to minimize bit-rot, this is fine.

The point is to create something that's minimal and focuses on functionality. The CSS is just there to make it not look like a Web 1.0 page but otherwise steps out of the way to focus on the actual usage of the application.

For context, here are some projects where I've used this philosophy (all open source, feel free to pilfer): Noixer [6], Resonator Voyant Tarot [7], Boston Train Track (now defunct) [8], CalebHarrington.com (an artist friend) [9], What Is This License [10], HSV Hero [11].

[0] http://getskeleton.com/

[1] https://getbootstrap.com/

[2] https://jquery.com/

[3] https://github.com/sloisel/numeric

[4] https://github.com/rndme/download

[5] https://github.com/berthubert/audience-minutes

[6] https://mechaelephant.com/noixer/

[7] https://abetusk.github.io/ResonatorVoyantTarot/

[8] https://github.com/abetusk/bostontraintrack

[9] https://calebharrington.com/

[10] https://mechaelephant.com/whatisthislicense/

[11] https://mechaelephant.com/hsvhero

Buy a bootstrap theme, they're cheap and they offer a lot out of the box. Better solution than bare tailwind, which actually requires you to know how to design. I used tailwind on my personal website, result was good but I had to do a lot more than if I used a bootstrap theme.

You make your app ui work within the boundaries of your bootstrap theme and you're good for 96% of the design stuff.

If you don't want to even learn bootstrap css classes and stuff, consider https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/

It's amazing, you drop it and you have a theme based on the html only. I use this mostly for prototyping though

Like the previous submitter ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30885700 April 2022 ) I found clasless.css while investigating semantic html-oriented css libraries and this one stood out to me as having a good balance. I'm not ideologically opposed to using classes, but using them for every bit of styling seems off and I'd rather see good default styles for regular semantically structured html. For example, classless.css uses the "card" class for cards which don't have a clear analog in among standard html tags: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element

Other libraries:

Water.css: https://watercss.kognise.dev/

MVP.css: https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/

Missing.css: https://missing.style/

i collect these for fun! adding to my collection https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#dro...

more like this:

  -  https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/ mvp.css

On a side note, you can throw something like water.css , tacit, or MVP.css for quick and easy styling and you just focus on the HTML.

Since this tool was just for testing, I wanted a simple CSS solution so that I didn't have to focus on styling. I went with MVP.css and Tailwind for small tweaks. It worked really well, but in the future, I'd like to take a look at Pico.css, which I just learned about from this Fireship video.

You could pay a front end dev to use a preexisting template.

Or, you could Google “classless CSS”, if you’re OK writing some HTML.

I made a plug and play CSS library here for those that don’t want to write CSS: https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp