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Simple CSS

A screenshot of the Simple.css home page

Simple CSS was suggested to me by a friend. At the time I had been making an effort to try and learn web development. In essence, it is yet another CSS framework to bootstrap your HTML for fast production. Except, it's not, not really. I'd argue, it's better.

The first thing that makes Simple CSS by Kev Quirk so good compared to other CSS frameworks, is that it's not strictly a framework - it's just one file. One tiny CSS file. No reset.css, no javascript.

..the minified CSS for the Bootstrap framework is 144KB in total. By comparison, Simple.css is around 10KB

It also describes itself as mostly classless. The Simple Classes page describes merely two classes: a.button and p.notice.

..makes semantic HTML look good, really quickly

Being classless, it focuses on semantic HTML. This means Simple CSS also becomes a fantastic learning resource. The MDN docs are great, but reading and retaining all of that is quite a task. The specs for HTML alone are just so vast, let alone CSS and Javascript. All to often, CSS magic or Javascript wizadry, or a combination of both, get employed to perform a task that HTML can just do already, out of the box. Take the details HTML element for example, collapsible and hideable using HTML only!

Not only is Simple CSS efficient and useful, it's also an introduction to good practises for those of us who've been swept along by the Bootstrapped boot-camps. Learning about the efficiency of good semantics has sent me on a bit of learning quest for good, and standardised, practises that I might otherwise not thought to have seek out, so thank you Kev. And I hope others slow down to look at the doctree's too, eh? (it's supposed to be a play on that smell the flowers .. ah forget it, a joke that has to be explained is a bad one).