Surfing online, I stumbled upon Pico, which is a framework that separates itself from the other utility frameworks by becoming invisible in your HTML. So, instead of adding utility classes like padding, margin, bg-color, and so on, it styles the standard HTML elements with a default style. I think of this approach as a cross between a CSS reset and a CSS framework.

I was impressed with this strategy because we usually make things more difficult when trying to make them simple. Also, it provides enough stying to HTML elements that you don’t need a lot of customization.

I will be recommending this little framework to my students because it let them concentrate on writing a more semantic and clean code as their skills improve as developers. It is good to see a framework that gets out of the way and allows new developers to create beautiful pages without having to learn a lot of classes and tricks for that particular framework.

The framework is just one CSS file that is less than 10KB when minified and gzipped. Also, it provides a responsive grid, styled form elements, styled tables, and theme modes. It includes basic components like a progress bar, nav, accordion, card, and modals. There are also some utility attributes like showing a spinner when loading items and tooltips.

I took a minute and created a blog example using the Pico to see how clean and easy to maintain the HTML. But, I would recommend checking the examples out and trying to use Pico in your small projects.

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