The use of frameworks has become ubiquitous in the web design and development community. Everyone has their favourites and most could debate their advantages and disadvantages for hours.
A common complaint with one of the more popular frameworks, Bootstrap, is that fact it styles a lot of elements automatically without any input, adding shadow, borders and rounded corners. There is also the issue of dependencies; Bootstrap relies on jQuery for a lot of its functionality and features, so to take full advantage of it, users have to add the jQuery library to their page load.
A new contender has, however, entered the fray. Called ‘Layers’, it claims to be a style-agnostic framework and makes a cheeky reference to giving the user freedom when it comes to the look of their website or application without Twitter’s predefined element styled. Adding normalisation (CSS reset) and a fluid grid system, it provides a solid base for design without being too invasive with its styling.
A quick review of the features shows that the creator of Layers has really stripped back the framework to the basics and is providing the designer with exactly what they need to begin their design, even adding an interesting class called ‘.plain’. This strips the element of all its OS-added styling and leaves the user with a plain, blank element to add their own touches – a fantastic idea as battling against some of Bootstrap’s in-built styling can be a tiresome job.
Layers CSS is an open-source project authored by Jerry Jäppinen and released under the MIT license.
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