Classless CSS frameworks

When building a small website or rails app, sometimes adding a CSS framework and styling your pages can be a time-consuming overkill.

Luckily there exist Classless CSS frameworks like SimpleCSS or MVP.CSS.

A classless CSS frameworks directly styles HTML attributes.

<!-- Tailwind CSS -->
<body class="border-s rounded-m p-16 shadow-l">
<!-- Bootstrap CSS -->
<body class="container">
<!-- Classless CSS -->
<body>

So if you write semantic HTML, when adding a classless CSS framework, the styling will be applied automatically!

Just include the CDN in your layout:

# app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<head>
    ...
+  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.simplecss.org/simple.min.css">
</head>

Here’s how your app can look Without VS With an included Classless CSS framework:

semantic html with a classless css framework

Also, if you read the actual CSS file that you import, you can learn some great practices to writing CSS.

Thinking further, you can potentially swap classless CSS frameworks in your app like themes!…