Skeleton
Skeleton: A Dead Simple, Responsive Boilerplate for Mobile-Friendly Development
Top Related Projects
Modern CSS framework based on Flexbox
The most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. Quickly create prototypes and production code for sites that work on any kind of device.
Semantic is a UI component framework based around useful principles from natural language.
A modern alternative to CSS resets
Quick Overview
Skeleton is a lightweight and responsive CSS boilerplate that provides a solid foundation for building modern websites and web applications. It offers a clean and minimalist design, making it easy to customize and extend to fit your project's needs.
Pros
- Lightweight: Skeleton is a small and efficient CSS framework, weighing in at just around 400 lines of code.
- Responsive Design: The framework includes a responsive grid system that adapts to different screen sizes, ensuring your website looks great on any device.
- Easy to Customize: Skeleton's simple and modular structure makes it easy to customize and extend to fit your project's specific requirements.
- Cross-Browser Compatibility: The framework is designed to work well across a wide range of modern browsers, ensuring a consistent user experience.
Cons
- Limited Functionality: Skeleton is a minimalist framework, which means it may not provide all the features and components that some developers might need for more complex projects.
- Outdated: The project has not been actively maintained since 2016, and some of the dependencies and best practices may be outdated compared to more recent CSS frameworks.
- Lack of Documentation: The project's documentation is relatively sparse, which can make it challenging for new users to get started and understand the framework's capabilities.
- Limited Community Support: Due to the project's lack of active maintenance, the community support and resources available for Skeleton may be limited compared to more popular CSS frameworks.
Code Examples
N/A (Skeleton is a CSS framework, not a code library)
Getting Started
To get started with Skeleton, follow these steps:
- Download the latest version of the Skeleton CSS file from the GitHub repository.
- Include the Skeleton CSS file in the
<head>
section of your HTML document:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="path/to/skeleton.css">
- Create the basic HTML structure for your page, using Skeleton's predefined classes and elements:
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="column">
<h1>Welcome to my website</h1>
<p>This is a sample page built with Skeleton.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
- Customize the styles and layout as needed by modifying the Skeleton CSS file or adding your own custom CSS.
That's the basic setup to get started with Skeleton. You can explore the framework's documentation to learn more about its grid system, typography, forms, buttons, and other features.
Competitor Comparisons
Modern CSS framework based on Flexbox
Pros of Bulma
- Bulma is a modern, responsive, and mobile-first CSS framework, while Skeleton is a more traditional, grid-based framework.
- Bulma has a larger and more active community, with more documentation and resources available.
- Bulma provides a wider range of pre-built components and utilities, making it easier to build complex user interfaces.
Cons of Bulma
- Bulma has a larger file size compared to Skeleton, which may impact performance for smaller projects.
- Bulma's syntax and class naming conventions may be less intuitive for developers familiar with other CSS frameworks.
- Bulma may have a steeper learning curve for developers new to CSS frameworks.
Code Comparison
Skeleton:
.container {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
max-width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0 20px;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
Bulma:
.container {
flex-grow: 1;
margin: 0 auto;
position: relative;
width: auto;
}
The most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
Pros of Bootstrap
- Extensive documentation and community support
- Wide range of pre-built components and utilities
- Responsive design and mobile-first approach
Cons of Bootstrap
- Larger file size compared to Skeleton
- Opinionated design that may not fit all project needs
- Potential for overuse of Bootstrap-specific classes
Code Comparison
Skeleton:
body {
font-size: 1.5em;
line-height: 1.6;
font-weight: 400;
font-family: "Raleway", "HelveticaNeue", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color: #222;
}
Bootstrap:
body {
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji";
font-size: 1rem;
font-weight: 400;
line-height: 1.5;
color: #212529;
text-align: left;
}
The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. Quickly create prototypes and production code for sites that work on any kind of device.
Pros of Foundation
- Extensive documentation and community support
- Comprehensive set of UI components and utilities
- Responsive grid system with advanced features
Cons of Foundation
- Larger file size compared to Skeleton
- Steeper learning curve for beginners
- Potential for over-engineering in simple projects
Code Comparison
Skeleton:
.container {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
max-width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0 20px;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
Foundation:
.grid-container {
padding-right: 0.625rem;
padding-left: 0.625rem;
max-width: 75rem;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
Semantic is a UI component framework based around useful principles from natural language.
Pros of Semantic-UI
- Semantic-UI provides a more comprehensive set of UI components and features compared to Skeleton, including a wide range of pre-built elements like buttons, menus, and form controls.
- The Semantic-UI documentation is more extensive and user-friendly, making it easier for developers to get started and find the resources they need.
- Semantic-UI has a larger and more active community, with more third-party plugins and integrations available.
Cons of Semantic-UI
- Semantic-UI is a larger and more complex framework, which can make it more challenging to customize and integrate into certain projects.
- The Semantic-UI codebase is larger than Skeleton, which can result in a larger file size and potentially slower load times for some projects.
- Semantic-UI has a steeper learning curve compared to Skeleton, especially for developers who are new to front-end development.
Code Comparison
Skeleton:
body {
font-size: 1.5em;
line-height: 1.6;
font-weight: 400;
font-family: "Raleway", "HelveticaNeue", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color: #222;
}
Semantic-UI:
body {
font-family: 'Lato', 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 1.4285em;
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87);
}
As you can see, Semantic-UI provides a more detailed and opinionated set of default styles for the body element, while Skeleton takes a more minimalist approach.
A modern alternative to CSS resets
Pros of Normalize.css
- Normalize.css provides a consistent baseline for styling across different browsers, ensuring a more predictable and reliable user experience.
- It addresses common cross-browser inconsistencies, such as default margin and padding values, font styles, and form element appearances.
- Normalize.css is a lightweight and well-maintained library, making it a popular choice for web developers.
Cons of Normalize.css
- Normalize.css does not provide any additional styling or layout components, unlike Skeleton, which offers a more comprehensive set of UI elements.
- The library may not be as customizable as Skeleton, as it focuses on normalizing browser defaults rather than providing a complete design framework.
Code Comparison
Normalize.css:
/*! normalize.css v8.0.1 | MIT License | github.com/necolas/normalize.css */
/* Document
========================================================================== */
/**
* 1. Correct the line height in all browsers.
* 2. Prevent adjustments of font size after orientation changes in iOS.
*/
html {
line-height: 1.15; /* 1 */
-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; /* 2 */
}
Skeleton:
/*
* Skeleton V2.0.4
* Copyright 2014, Dave Gamache
* www.getskeleton.com
* Free to use under the MIT license.
*/
/* Base Styles
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– */
html {
font-size: 62.5%;
}
body {
font-size: 1.5em; /* currently ems cause chrome bug misinterpreting rems on body element */
line-height: 1.6;
font-weight: 400;
font-family: "Raleway", "HelveticaNeue", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color: #222;
}
Convert designs to code with AI
Introducing Visual Copilot: A new AI model to turn Figma designs to high quality code using your components.
Try Visual CopilotREADME
Skeleton
Skeleton is a simple, responsive boilerplate to kickstart any responsive project.
Check out http://getskeleton.com for documentation and details.
Getting started
There are a couple ways to download Skeleton:
- Download the zip
- Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton.git
(Note: this is under active development, so if you're looking for stable and safe, use the zipped download)
What's in the download?
The download includes Skeleton's CSS, Normalize CSS as a reset, a sample favicon, and an index.html as a starting point.
Skeleton/
âââ index.html
âââ css/
â âââ normalize.min.css
â âââ skeleton.css
âââ images/
âââ favicon.ico
Why it's awesome
Skeleton is lightweight and simple. It styles only raw HTML elements (with a few exceptions) and provides a responsive grid. Nothing more.
- Around 400 lines of CSS unminified and with comments
- It's a starting point, not a UI framework
- No compiling or installing...just vanilla CSS
Browser support
- Chrome latest
- Firefox latest
- Opera latest
- Safari latest
- IE latest
The above list is non-exhaustive. Skeleton works perfectly with almost all older versions of the browsers above, though IE certainly has large degradation prior to IE9.
License
All parts of Skeleton are free to use and abuse under the open-source MIT license.
Extensions
The following are extensions to Skeleton built by the community. They are not officially supported, but all have been tested and are compatible with v2.0 (exact release noted):
- Skeleton on LESS: Skeleton built with LESS for easier replacement of grid, color, and media queries. (Last update was to match v2.0.1)
- Skeleton on Sass: Skeleton built with Sass for easier replacement of grid, color, and media queries. (Last update was to match v2.0.1)
Have an extension you want to see here? Just shoot an email to hi@getskeleton.com with your extension!
Colophon
Skeleton was built using Sublime Text 3 and designed with Sketch. The typeface Raleway was created by Matt McInerney and Pablo Impallari. Code highlighting by Google's Prettify library. Icons in the header of the documentation are all derivative work of icons from The Noun Project. Feather by Zach VanDeHey, Pen (with cap) by Ed Harrison, Pen (with clicker) by Matthew Hall, and Watch by Julien Deveaux.
Acknowledgement
Skeleton was created by Dave Gamache for a better web.
Top Related Projects
Modern CSS framework based on Flexbox
The most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.
The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. Quickly create prototypes and production code for sites that work on any kind of device.
Semantic is a UI component framework based around useful principles from natural language.
A modern alternative to CSS resets
Convert designs to code with AI
Introducing Visual Copilot: A new AI model to turn Figma designs to high quality code using your components.
Try Visual Copilot