Can you recommend a CSS framework that feels lean and modern like Pico CSS but isn’t only targeting small form sites?
I’m a big fan of Web Awesome. It can scale from just a CSS starter like Pico all the way to a full component library, depending on what you need.
I pay attention to whatever @zachleat@zachleat.com is doing.
Serious question - and this is coming from someone who’s used a handful from Bulma to Bootstrap to Foundation… all the way back to 960.gs - with today’s robust state of CSS, what is the advantage to a traditional framework in 2026? What’s the use case?
I don’t do web development, but I dabbled a little with Tailwind CSS a while back and found it to be a really nice way to work. AFAIK, you can’t do that in standard CSS without dedicating the time to design and write your own library of classes.
Or if you need something smaller, simpler and more modular: purecss.io
(Yes it’s weird that they called a framework “pure” css, but it’s been a solid go to for a long time)
Pure has been around for a while. I’ve gone…
- Bootstrap 3 (sucked)
- Inuit (wound up being untenable)
- Foundation (died)
- Bootstrap 4 (sucked)
- Bulma
- Tailwind*
*Specific project hierarchy and postprocessing required. Unbeatable with a good pipeline, unusable without one.
- Bootstrap 2-5 sucked, but it was great for throwaway internal tools that will never become public.
- Foundation died to bootstrap.
- Pure was made by yahoo and went unmaintained so some other people wanted something like pure but they wanted to monetize it, then Pure got remaintained by it’s community
- Tailwind isn’t great, it sold devs on a lie by limiting choices to limit mistakes, but limiting choices also restricted the features that devs needed to do their projects properly. They tried to figure out a way to add those features but suffered from gradual scope creep while trying to maintain it’s original lie and has ended up more complicated than it needed to be while being less featureful than what devs needed. What they should have done instead of making everything a utility class, was keep the build system (lightning css), add a token system (e.g. open props, or their own version of it), allow people to add their own css instead of trying to shoehorn it into a class, then went out of their way to teach people how to make things as classless as possible.
I’m currently looking for an alternative for a website I’m redeveloping . What are your cons against pico?
From your post it sounds like it is more for small sites. Could it become problematic to use it in a medium sized site?
Pico CSS looks like it focuses mainly on forms. The documentation is incomplete. I can see images on an example page, but the documentation doesn’t mention which options are available.
What exactly is a CSS framework? Something which supplies a bunch of CSS classes with predefined styles?
I don’t really see the benefit of those so can’t actually help. I guess this is a suggestion to not bother with one :P
What even is a restaurant? A place with a menu? I don’t understand why people go to those. I suggest cooking at home.
I understand that restaurants allow you to eat without cooking. But what does a CSS framework save you? You still have to write stuff to get the design you want, and you still have to come up with the design. Feel free to explain rather than drop another analogy…
the same could be said for languages that aren’t binary: what does it save you! you still have to write stuff to get the program you want, and you still have to come up with the business rules
almost all software engineering tools just save you keystrokes, or save you from needing the knowledge to implement repeatable things… or for having a standardised way of doing things so new people can approach your project without having to learn as many details (eg rails, django, nextjs, etc: the terminology and layout of such projects are familiar; daos/views/etc all behave the same)
for css frameworks for example, perhaps you have a .rounded-corners class… sure you could just implement it yourself, but if you’re using a framework you save a few minutes, the outcome is likely the same, you don’t need to know about the border radius details (and likely css frameworks implement things like shims or accessibility correctly; freeing you from needing to have deep knowledge of some esoteric details), and if the framework is big (like tailwind etc) then if you employ someone new, they know exactly what .rounded-corners means
… obviously .rounded-corners is a pretty simple example, but you can imagine when these libraries fill out with many many tools the shorthand’s get much more complex
rounded-cornerssaves you time over writingborder-radius: 6px? And what aboutrounded-md, what does that do (in tailwind)? What abouttext-2xlversusfont-medium? And what happens when you want to have a couple of styles in common between different elements so you actually need to use classes as they were intended, so you have to know CSS and this weird version where you write all your CSS in the class attribute.Thanks for taking the time to write down your perspective; I still just don’t get it though.
i’m not a frontend engineer so don’t know the difference between text- and font- without looking but that’s another good example of why frameworks are great: 6px is an explicit size, where md, 2xl, etc are all relative… per project you can decide what those sizes are and everything just falls into place… you rarely really care what the size is in pixels; mostly you only care about sizes relative to other parts of the UI… so again, people joining on a project don’t need to memorise magic numbers, because they just know without needing to guess what the size suffixes are
i’ve only recently started to use tailwind (originally i saw no point, pretty much for the reasons you’re stating: why use classes like that when you can just use styles on the element and we know that’s bad) but since i embraced it i’ve started writing quality components much much faster… especially for layout like flexbox and grid it just flows really nicely, and i really don’t find that it feels like i’m repeating myself at all (partly because “repeating yourself” should be avoided by simply using components these days: CSS is an over-complicated and ill-fitting solution to the problem of styling in modern UIs)
(okay i looked up text- and font-: text is size, font is weight… which tracks with my understanding of the other parts of tailwind and the way type is handled in software generally… i think there are no good options here)
per project you can decide what those sizes are and everything just falls into place… you rarely really care what the size is in pixels; mostly you only care about sizes relative to other parts of the UI… so again, people joining on a project don’t need to memorise magic numbers, because they just know without needing to guess what the size suffixes are
You can do all that with a CSS variable though…
I think the text- and font- prefixes are emblematic though; because you end up with this soup of classes on every single element, they have to be as short as possible, and so they can’t use
font-sizeandfont-weight.I can imagine it working nicely for flexbox, because that is complicated, but I still suspect you’re better off just using the effort you would need to learn the tailwind classes to instead learn plain flexbox.
You can do all that with a CSS variable though…
and then people have to learn what it all means, where those variables are, how your mess of custom CSS hangs together, and probably what overrides what in your hierarchy
you end up with this soup of classes on every single element
it’s either than or a soup of stuff in CSS. the difference is largely academic in modern HTML because it’s all contained in components anyway
they have to be as short as possible, and so they can’t use
font-sizeandfont-weight.they don’t have to be; they could easily use font size and font weight, but i much much prefer the -lg notation… it makes your flow so much quicker. it reduces cognitive load significantly
I still suspect you’re better off just using the effort you would need to learn the tailwind classes to instead learn plain flexbox.
i know flexbox and grid plenty well, and similar applies across the board for things like tailwind: containing everything together so that you don’t have to mess around switching between different places to define things, and using classes that kinda just represent what you want in shorthand literally makes my frontend development literally 10x quicker, and just feel smoother… even when i’m just doing personal projects
you don’t have to believe me; that’s fine… but i used to think similarly to you, had a couple of failed attempts and hated tailwind, and my most recent personal projects it just clicked and everything feels so nice. i’m a principal engineer, and have done plenty of work on all kinds of projects so it’s not like i’m inexperienced and just go with the latest fad. these small time savings really add up
A CSS framework allows you to not write any CSS! You just add utility classes to your html. I personally use tailwind and I guess there’s some advanced stuff where you’d have to still write CSS yourself but for most use cases it’s a lot easier. Flex layouts, notably, are a breeze.
Aren’t the classes pretty much a 1:1 correspondence to CSS though?
Pretty much yeah, with shortcuts for frequent sizes, colors etc (which you can theme). I guess it’s mostly interesting if you use react, as you can have everything inside components and switch classes in your code. I wouldn’t say it makes things categorically better but it does lighten the cognitive load somewhat and the auto complete is fire.
Some (many) people find it easier to learn a small number of predefined class names that accomplish what they want without having to know hundreds of different CSS incantations when they’re just trying to make a simple site.
Sorta like how people use a command-line instead of just writing the code themselves.
I am primarily an embedded software engineer. However every now and again I have to write small web apps, having a CSS framework allows me to style it with pre-made classes saving me a boatload of work and learning and having the result look good.
Then I’d just use bootstrap though coz who cares
