Picnic CSS

Unpack your meal and get coding. An invasive CSS library to get your style started.

Getting started

Include the following line in your <head>:

<link href="http://picnicss.com/releases/v1.1.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Alternatively:

With bower: bower install picnic

Clone it: git clone https://github.com/picnicss/picnic.git

Authors

Created by Francisco Presencia. SASS from Jordan Wallwork. Significant fixes from Alex Galushka.

Wait, invasive?

Many libraries rely upon adding classes to your already existing html elements, resulting in bloated code like <button class = "btn btn-primary">Hey</button>. It would be easier if the buttons knew they are, well, buttons. Crazy eh?

This setup works neatly for newly created projects or for pages that you have to build quick from scratch.

Note: the more unstable components require the use of a wrapper with a class to make them work. These are: select for <select>, radio for <input type="radio"> and checkbox for <input type="checkbox">.

Another note: the sass version has a parameter called $invasive. Set it to false and you'll need to add classes like button to your elements to have this style.

Browser support IE9+

Bug reports and fixes only for IE9+. With IE8 usage dropping fast and with IE9 and IE10 usage even below their older mate, it is time to start thinking about not supporting them anymore. However, bug fixes for IE9 will be accepted and everything is expected to run smooth down to it. For Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari up to 2 previous versions are expected to be working, and everything that is not is definitely a bug.

Example usage

After including the stylesheet as indicated in the Getting started:

<form>
  What's your favourite Picnic CSS feature?
  
  <label class="select">
    <select name="feature">
      <option value="semantic">    Semantic HTML5 </option>
      <option value="lightweight"> Lightweight    </option>
      <option value="css3">        Only CSS3      </option>
      <option value="responsive">  Responsive     </option>
    </select>
  </label>
  
  <input type="email" placeholder="Email to receive updates">
  
  <button class="primary"> Subscribe! </button>
</form>

If you don't see anything that seems picnic.css exclusive, that's because there's nothing, that's the main purpose of Picnic CSS. However, try it out and you'll see a decent example in your browser.

Advantages

Only CSS3 is needed and your HTML5 stays highly semantic*.
5.0kb when minimized and zipped last time I checked.
Normalize.css is used, achieving a solid foundation.
Support: IE 9+ and others. No fancy CSS3 on IE 8.
Responsive: The nav and the grids are responsive.

* Except for the grids and a bit of the nav :(

Disadvantages

<select> support is not great, however it's better than most of the similar solutions listed below. This is solved by making it optional.
Difficult to drop in an already created project. This is what I meant by invasive. This is solved with the optional $invasive SASS variable.
The grids introduce an unsemantic component to your HTML5 if you decide to use them. Need further investigation to solve it.

Alternatives and why I still created Picnic CSS

PureCSS: Lightweight, nice package. The thing I would be using if I didn't build Picnic CSS and where I took the inspiration. However, no nice <select> out of the box and the non-responsive grid from the CDN feels like a stab on the back.

Bootstrap: Really comprehensive, but too many files and too heavy for most of the websites. It also relies too much on javascript. Still cannot get the <select> right out of the box.

Building

Install dependencies using npm install
To build once, run gulp
For development, run gulp watch to rebuild whenever any of the sass files are changed

Some love

Clrs the new nice web palette (from HN) used for Picnic CSS.
Fontello an icon library that plays really nice with others.
Tympanus buttons so many hours exploring its amazing CSS designs.
Normalize the foundation of Picnic CSS

galulex / picnic