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.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
