Drop-in switcher for previewing minimal CSS frameworks

  • By Liam Doherty
  • Last update: Jan 5, 2023
  • Comments: 14

Drop-in switcher for previewing minimal CSS frameworks

This is a quick drop-in CSS switcher to allow for previewing some of the many minimal CSS-only frameworks that are available. See the demo or drop the switcher into your own page to see how different frameworks would look together with your content.

This project only includes minimal frameworks, in other words, boilerplate / classless frameworks that require no adjustment of the corresponding HTML and can be simply dropped into the project to provide a starting point for further design. No additional javascript, compiling, pre-processors, or fiddling with classes should be required for these to look good and be responsive.

Usage

To use the CSS switcher, just add the following line anywhere within the body tag on your page:

<script src="https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/switcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That's it! You should now be able to cycle through the different frameworks by choosing them from the dropdown at the top of the page.

Keyboard shortcut

You can quickly switch between frameworks by pressing the modifier key or keys on your keyboard + s to focus the switcher dropdown menu, followed by the up and down keys to move up and down the list.

Bookmarklet

The bookmarklet is a convenient way to preview how different CSS frameworks would look on any HTML page. Just paste the following code into your address bar to create a CSS switcher for any site:

javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20body%20%3D%20document.getElementsByTagName('body')%5B0%5D%3Bscript%20%3D%20document.createElement('script')%3Bscript.type%3D%20'text%2Fjavascript'%3Bscript.src%3D%20'https%3A%2F%2Fdohliam.github.io%2Fdropin-minimal-css%2Fswitcher.js'%3Bbody.appendChild(script)%7D)()

Or alternatively, drag the link at the top of the demo page to your browser's bookmark bar.

Boomarklet generated by the Bookmarklet Creator. Thanks to markdown-css for the idea!

API

There is a simple API available to allow linking directly to particular stylesheets on the demo page. For example:

https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/?sakura

The above links directly to the demo with Sakura CSS.

Frameworks

Adding frameworks

If you know of a minimal framework that hasn't been included here, please create an issue or pull request so that we can add it to the list!

List of frameworks

Theme collections

See also

  • workflow - Quick prototyping script for creating rich html and pdfs from markdown documents (based on dropin-minimal-css)
  • asciidoctor-skins - CSS stylesheets for asciidoctor (with a switcher based on dropin-minimal-css)

Other similar collections

Acknowledgements

License

MIT.

Github

https://github.com/dohliam/dropin-minimal-css

Comments(14)

  • 1

    Add Minimal stylesheet

    This adds Minimal stylesheet to the switcher. It also adds a missing closing bracket :)

    Note that Minimal stylesheet doesn't have a license. If you don't want to include it because of that, feel free to close this.

  • 2

    Add "The Missing Style"

    This adds "The Missing Style" (https://missing.style/) to the list.

    Note: The LICENSE file is currently missing from the repo, but that is the URL it will have when it is added.

  • 3

    Demo does not cover inter-item spacing for description/ordered/unordered lists

    Hi!

    Cool project, it made me run into okcss — my current favorite — thanks for that! ~I noticed the demo doesn't cover description lists — <dl>, <dt>, <dd> — are there plans to add that?~

    Thanks and best, Sebastian

  • 4

    Template should have nested lists

    Please included nested lists in the template.

      <li>Top level
        <ul>
          <li>Inside</li>
        </ul>
      </li>
    

    Some frameworks are not handling that properly. So preview will help.

  • 5

    Update bahunya.css

    Hi Liam!

    I updated bahunya tremendously recently and just wanted to bring the bahunya on this site up to speed.

    Feel free to check out the newest one on https://www.hakanalpay.com/bahunya

    Cheers, thanks for hosting my framework!

  • 6

    Wrong author for papier

    papier is listed with @baasdesign as the author. Unless I'm missing something obvious, I don't think that's correct. Think it should be @alexanderGugel.

  • 7

    Adjust formatting of framework list

    Revert to previous format (i.e., [link to project] by @author ([preview link] · [license link]). For example:

    Instead of:

    Hopefully this should be a bit clearer, since it seems natural to assume that the project name links to the project website rather than a preview.

  • 8

    Add awsm themes collection

  • 9

    Add W3C Core Styles

    This W3C Core Styles are a collection of CSS stylesheets that have been made available by the W3C for more than two decades:

    The W3C Core Styles offer authors an easy way to start using style sheets without becoming designers. By adding a link in the head of your documents, a CSS browser will fetch the style sheet of your choice from W3C's server when it encounters your document. A non-CSS browser will display the HTML document like it always did.

    Included styles:

  • 10

    Horizontal scroll

    I don't know if this is the right place to ask, sorry if not.

    Most frameworks present horizontal scroll on mobile, which is annoying from a responsiveness perspective, including some that claim to be responsive. Is it because of this particular demo implementation or they aren't really as responsive as they claim to be?

  • 11

    Adding autoplay feature to go through the list of frameworks automati…

    Thanks @dohliam for the awesome curated list and the cool switcher javascript. I updated the script slightly here to let user hit a button to automatically cycle through the list of frameworks, making it a lot easier to pick the theme they want.

    (I also moved the position of the switcher to absolute position in top right as shown in the screenshot)

    image

  • 12

    Add reference to responsivness

    I might or might not have scrolled through the entirety of the list to check whether the stylesheets are responsive or not. Foolishly, I only noted for a few of them the result of my check.

    Is there any smarter way to add a mention of whether a stylesheet is responsive or not? Maybe add a (Responsive) next to the ones that are?

  • 13

    index.html: Move to larger video to test if frameworks can handle it.

    The video is 1920 x 1080 which means that centered CSS themes will need a special rule to resize the video to fit inside the margin. From early testing only a few of the CSS dropins correctly handle this, awsm.css being one of them.


    Here is what it looks like: https://avrma-forks.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

  • 14

    Add destyle.css

    I propose to add https://github.com/nicolas-cusan/destyle.css to the list. It is a reset stylesheet, but as normalize.css is also on the list I thought i give it a try 🤷‍♂️ . (Full disclosure, I am the author). Thank you!