numeric VS Water.css

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

Thank you!

In the beginning, I used kognise'z water.css [1], so most of the smart decisions (background/text color, margins, line spacing I think) probably come from there. Since then it's been some amount of little adjustments. The font is by Jean François Porchez, called Le Monde Livre Classic [2].

I draft in Obsidian [3] and build the site with a couple python scripts and KaTeX.

[1] https://watercss.kognise.dev/

[2] https://typofonderie.com/fr/fonts/le-monde-livre-classic

[3] https://obsidian.md/

Thank you!

I must give credit to Kognise though, the style is simply their formidable water.css layout. It saved me a lot of time and anguish when I was about to get my blog started.

https://watercss.kognise.dev/

https://watercss.kognise.dev/ I would argue classless css is the way to go, you just include a single css file, then write your html without touching any css anymore, all related tags in html are inherently css-ed for you. a nice trade off for me sometimes.

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/

WaterCSS, very basic but good-looking UI in my opinion

Slap this on it and you're good: https://github.com/kognise/water.css/

- https://watercss.kognise.dev/ Small size (< 2kb)