Using w3.css

Friday Nov 27, 2020

It was a bit depressing to see that people who had clicked “yes” to either Squarespace or Wordpress had much better looking websites than me… and for all that I (still) know about CSS, and all the hard won knowledge, I had almost nothing to show for it.

Sass

Basically, I find the popular frameworks just too vast to make sense of (especially with the reliance on using a Sass preprocessor, with even setting up the development environment sometimes being problematic, especially after the move away from Ruby Sass (and which is now officially deprecated) to either its C++ alternative, Libsass or its successor, Dart Sass).

No longer did I need Ruby …but now I needed Node and NPM, instead.

After setting up the development environments (and I’ve had them all working), I’ve almost needed a lie down, and that’s before starting to actually create anything.

Frameworks

The two frameworks I’ve tinkered with are/were (Zurb) Foundation and (Twitter) Bootstrap, and these are colossal in terms of the amount of stuff that’s possible, but then also in things needing to be configured, too.

But all I want to do is layout a web page…

The added complexity was that as well as outputting a single, final compressed CSS file, they also use JavaScript, too, complete with bits of jQuery functionality, so there’s another massive (and impossible for me to understand) library, too.

All a bit depressing, really.

CSS-only framework

Enter Bulma

Now, Bulma initially seemed better for me to get my head round (CSS only), and there was just enough documentation to read and make sense of. I even downloaded an eBook to read whenever I found myself waiting/hanging around… but it still seemed hard (to me) to get enough of what I was after without a lot more hard work. And I was still insistent on having a JavaScript (jQuery) collapsible menu, too.

So, I kind of lost interest, and found something else to play instead…

Hello w3.css

And then–quite by chance–I noticed this, w3.css

It’s just CSS (precompiled, but it’s hundreds not thousands of lines long, and with enough white space that I can read it comfortably).

So, no it’s not infinitely flexible, and doesn’t exactly smash it for heavy lifting but it is awfully easy to get up and running quickly!