A dead simple, responsive boilerplate.

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Super light at less than a kb & built with mobile in mind.
Styles designed to be a starting point, not a UI framework.
No compiling or installing necessary. Just vanilla CSS.
Is Skeleton for you?

You should use Skeleton if you're feeling like whole UI frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are overkill for your project and you just want the basics. Skeleton only styles a handful of standard HTML elements and includes a grid, but that's often more than enough to get started. In fact, this site is built on Skeleton and has less than 100 lines of custom CSS.

Love Skeleton and want to share it, follow it, love it? Well, I appreciate that <3

The grid

The grid is just a 12-column fluid grid with a max width of 960px, but the max can be changed with one line of CSS. The syntax is simple and it makes responsive implementation much, much easier. Go ahead, resize the browser.

One
Eleven
Two
Ten
Three
Nine
Four
Eight
Five
Seven
Six
Six
Seven
Five
Eight
Four
Nine
Three
Ten
Two
Eleven
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Ten

				
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Eleven

				
One
Typography

Type is all set with the rems, so font-sizes and spacial relationships are responsively sized based on a single <html> font-size property. Everything is still base 10 though so, an <h1> is 5.0rem, which just means 50px.

The typography base is 15rem (15px) over a 1.6 line height (24px). Other type basics like anchors, strong, emphasis, and underline are all obviously included.

Headings create a family of distinct sizes each with specific letter-spacing, line-height, and margins.

Heading <h1> 50rem

Heading <h2> 42rem

Heading <h3> 36rem

Heading <h4> 30rem

Heading <h5> 24rem
Heading <h6> 15rem
	
		

			

				
One

				
Eleven
Buttons

Buttons come in two basic flavors in Skeleton. The standard <button> element is vibrant, whereas the .secondary button takes a monotone backseat.

Anchor button Anchor button
Forms

Forms are a huge pain, but hopefully these styles make it a bit easier.

Lists
  • Unordered lists have basic styles
  • They use the circle list style
    • Nested lists styled to feel right
    • Can nest either type of list into the other
  • Just more list items mama san
  1. Ordered lists also have basic styles
  2. They use the decimal list style
    • Ordered and unordered can be nested
    • Can nest either type of list into the other
  3. Last list item just for the fun
Code

Code styling was kept super basic – basically just wrap something in a <code> tag and it will look just like that code tag just did. For blocks of code just use a <pre> tag.

.some-class {
  background-color: red
}
Tables

Only most basic styling for tabular data. Remember to always use a proper table structure – check the code example if you're not sure about it.

Name Age Sex Location
Dave Gamache 26 Male San Francisco
Dwayne Johnson 42 Male Hayward
Media queries

Skeleton uses media queries to serve the scalable grid, but also has a list of queries for convenience of styling your site across devices. There are two sets of queries, the first is mobile-first style, meaning they target min-width so all the base styles are mobile, then queries are used to enhance for larger screen sizes. Mobile-first queries are how Skeleton's grid is styled. I've also provided the same set of queries with max-width if that's your preference. The sizes for the queries are:

  • Desktop HD: 1200px
  • Desktop: 1000px
  • Tablet: 750px
  • Phablet: 550px
  • Mobile: 400px
Examples of Skeleton sites
License & Log

All parts of Skeleton are free to use and abuse under the open-source MIT license. More importantly, if you're into coding head over to the Github page and contribute or fork this bad boy.

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