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Purecss.io – A set of small, responsive CSS modules by Yahoo (purecss.io)
195 points by isla-de-encanta on Aug 20, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 44 comments


I really love the default theme. Like a lot. And reading the source it makes a lot more sense to me than Bootstrap (eventhough, I'm sure, that bootstrap has a way bigger community/ecosystem in place.)

I'll make a superficial branch for some of my work and see how it ends up :)


Welp, after a day I can make some minor conclusions (I'm no CSS expert, so take with a grain of salt)

Pros - I like the design of my site more (subjective) - Was much easier to grok, I found that working with the grid was very straightforward.

Cons - Ended up writing a lot more CSS than I would for a bootstrap site. - Not having a responsive sticky footer was a pain in the ass. I spent a lot of the day working through that.


This is a wonderful library but it falls short on one major aspect which limits its design capabilities. Currently a block spanning N columns on a desktop must span N columns or 1 column on a mobile device. This means you can't have a 6x2 grid become a 2 by 6 grid on mobiles. It will have to be 12 blocks stacked on top of one another.

Inuit is another framework that allows for this though it lacks in documentation and a user friendly website.


We have a pull request to fix this: https://github.com/yui/pure/pull/146


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779494 Thread from 2 months ago with some insight from the core developers


<button class="pure-button pure-button-disabled">A Disabled Button</button>

Oh please. Why not just a <button disabled>? So much redundancy and overly-verboseness for nothing.

"Namespacing" your CSS classes would make sense if you were actually composing element's style from multiple frameworks/libraries (vs. programming code), but that's not usually the case with CSS frameworks.


I disagree with you.

Have a .button class for styles of the button, font-family, height, width, border-radius, etc. You want _all_ .button elements to share this look and feel.

Then overwrite background colors, border colors etc on a button-primary, button-delete, etc classes.

It makes sense and it works.


My point is that <button> already means a button and can be selected for default styling with 'button' or 'button.delete' selectors (by the framework and by you for overwriting). Ditto for [disabled], etc. (... also, support for multi-class selectors .like.this.and.that landed ages ago, no need for repeating-your repeating-your-class repeating-your-class-names-manually.)


Your argument doesn't work in the majority of cases. Many times a button element can be either a small '.toolbar-button', or a '.widget-button' or a '.principal-button'. Difference sizes, looks and feel, for the same element type.


Please read again what I wrote above. I'm not saying every button should look identical or you shouldn't use classes at all.


It's people like you that produce impossible to maintain css...


It's based on SMACSS, that's why they did it like that. It is a bit verbose though. I forked it so that I could make it a little cleaner. http://smacss.com/


I just started with Bootstrap 2 and now looking into Foundation 4 and Bootstrap 3.

Does PureCSS offer something missing in those 2 CSS frameworks?


I have used Bootstrap, Skeleton, and a few others. After a quick read of the docs, here is what I like about Pure:

1. It's lightweight.

2. It is stylistically plain.

3. The grid system is straightforward.


Care to shed more light on grid system?

As mentioned, I just started with bootstrap and found grid to work just fine for my usecases. What problems/annoyances did you face when using other CSS frameworks (which you feel Pure avoids)?


Basically - in bootstrap...etc, if you want to do something "nonstandard" by library view you need to carefully unmake all the defaults.

Here for example there are no default paddings forced upon you.

It all depends on wether you know what you want, or just need "anything that works - doesn't matter how and what it does".


Pure doesn't seem to support nested grids and column reordering, as both Bootstrap and Foundation do.

At some point I want to experiment with just how decoupled these big frameworks' grid systems are from the rest of the package. For example, can you use the following combinations:

Foundation 4 grid + Bootstrap 3 components

Bootstrap 3 grid + Topcoat components (Topcoat has no grid yet anyway)

Suzy grid + [Foundation 4 | Bootstrap 3 | Topcoat] components

etc.

I also want to performance test them all, using both Chrome dev tools [1] and Topcoat's Chromium Telemetry tests [2].

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1IqzeA3XXg

[2]: https://github.com/topcoat/topcoat/tree/master/dev/test/perf...


I kind of like the way Pure sets up their grid. Rather than doing bootstrap's row-and-column approach, you give things fractional widths, and what should fit into a row does.


Bootstrap has default/fluid/fixed to choose between, which can be confusing. In terms of mechanics, you nest .container, .row, and .span# and .offset#. It's just more complex.

I don't know how Pure does nested because I haven't tried it, but from reading the docs, it looks like you just put a new .pure-g classed div inside whatever cell you are nesting inside, then put the nested units inside it.


One additional advantage (that hasn't yet been mentioned) is that it supports older versions of Internet Explorer.


Bootstrap and Foundation have what Pure offers + more widgets enabled by javascript. Pure is analogous to just using bootstrap.css without the javascript. Short answer, No.


Not to be confused with Pure, the JS templating library

http://beebole.com/pure/


Or Pure, the functional programming language.

http://purelang.bitbucket.org/

(Now I feel tempted to write an app that uses all three.)


Hey guys, I'm one of the developers who wrote Pure. Feel free to direct any questions towards me.


I think Pure is great. I think you guys should tweak the messaging to emphasize that it's really easy to skin, much moreso than other CSS frameworks IMO. People are having a hard time differentiating it from something like Bootstrap, which tends to lead to "bootstrappy" sites.


The link to Normalize.css on the home page is a 404.


Good find. The pricing plan sample layout (http://purecss.io/layouts/) looks clean, even if I despise the blurred background with white text overlay. Reminds me of Windows 8 flat design.


I tend to get lost in customizing bootstrap sometimes. This, however, is amazing. http://yui.github.io/skinbuilder/?mode=pure


The nice thing about Pure to me is the fact that they encourage you to write your own top layer. While Bootstrap 3 says that they also encourage this, the number of components in Bootstrap make it somewhat difficult to learn and implement.

An hour of looking at Pure, however, is enough to get started with confidence.

The grid classes are a bit strange to me though.

`pure-u-1-2` is "descriptive"? Not so much, unless you know the system.


It's a bit strange to me too. I use this as a reference and it helps. http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/cssgrids/cssgrids-units-examp...


Funny that Yahoo is using Google Analytics :-)


YMail also lets you sign in with GMail. Obv, we're all aware of the Mayer connection, but it's still a curious move. What's Yahoo's play here? "Users." Okay, but what's the play? Cast aside all notions of vanity, and keep your eye on what you really want? (To train eyes on their content portal?) (Can it really be the case that Y.com is last man standing in the portal wars? Huh!)


Need to use the best if you're wanting to catch up to the rest..


First time I've heard of SMACSS and I LIKE it. I'm going to do some serious reading today.


buy the book. got it at my deskside. really helpful way of thinking about css.


The proxima-nova font is quite fuzzy on non-grey buttons (http://purecss.io/buttons/) on my thunderbolt display. I wouldn't be surprised if some people find it difficult to read.


I am confused as to how this is news. But yes, Pure does a good job. I feel like it influenced the new version of Bootstrap a bit.


I've built a site on it: http://audioterror.com/


Have you tried it on an iphone? Doesn't work very well unfortunately


He didn't use the pure responsive grid functionality for the sidebar. The sidebar examples on the pure site all collapse to corner menus.


nice..but why should i switch from Bootstrap.. looks light.. skin builder is better than bootstrap's..

any other advantages in using this??


So this is actually part of Yahoo's YUI?


It's based on parts of YUI and reworked from there. The plan is to have YUI depend on Pure for styling.


I hope it'll help Yahoo to fix the new shitty design of Flickr.




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