backpack.css
Advanced tools
A lightweight and somewhat opinionated CSS foundation that is best suited to applications 🎒.
A lightweight and somewhat opinionated CSS foundation that is best suited to applications.
Run the following command using npm:
npm install backpack.css --save-dev
If you prefer Yarn, use this command instead:
yarn add backpack.css --dev
CDN version coming soon, see.
Typically you'll be wanting to import all of backpack.css styles into your project but you do have the choice to be selective. The one strict rule is that it must come before your project's CSS to ensure correct ordering of your styles and to be able to override any of backpack.css styles.
If you're using a bundler such as webpack and wanting to import all of backpack.css then your projects entry point should look like this:
import 'backpack.css';
import '[path(s)-to-your-project-css]';
If you want to be selective then simply import the backpack.css files you need, for example:
import 'backpack.css/lib/resets.css';
import 'backpack.css/lib/content-sectioning.css';
import 'backpack.css/lib/forms.css';
import '[path(s)-to-your-project-css]';
The order at which you import each module is important, to see this order and what .css files are available refer to backpack.css index.css.
CDN version coming soon, see. In the meantime you can link to the hosted version on UNPKG via a <link> element in your HTML Head, however, make sure it comes before your project's CSS, e.g.:
<head>
[…]
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/backpack.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="[path-to-your-project-css]">
</head>
backpack.css is just CSS so you can easily override any of backpack.css styles just as you would override any CSS, as in, via the rules of the cascade and specificity.
For example, if you don't want to use system-ui as the global font-family set in main-root.css then simply redeclare it in your project CSS like so:
html {
font-family: serif;
}
Nowadays I'm building React applications that have highly componentised User Interfaces (UI) making use of native CSS layout mechanisms such as Flexbox and Grid. I'm no longer finding the need for heavy handed CSS frameworks that handle most of my UI concerns, especially layout and utilities. Instead I build components with a smidgen of global styles.
What I do need, however, are a bunch of smart and sensible foundational styles suited for applications that I would typically forget project to project—think Normalize.css and then some. Something that is lightweight, super easy to intergrate, and can easily be overriden or allow for modular use, thus giving birth to backpack.css 🙂🎒.
border-box value for the box-sizing property to all elements.<input> so that everything is on an even playing field.And more…
All of the CSS is very well documentated if you want to dig deeper.
This is the third CSS framework/library I've created. Looking at each one lets you see how UI development has evolved over the years with each iteration getting smaller and smaller.
Not everything will work in Internet Explorer 11, e.g.: the system-ui font, however, anything that doesn't work will simply degrade gracefully.
It's recommended to have Autoprefixer setup as part of your project's build.
Please see our contributing guidelines.
backpack.css is maintained under the Semantic Versioning guidelines. We'll do our best to adhere to those guidelines and strive to maintain backwards compatibility.
See the change log.
FAQs
A lightweight and somewhat opinionated CSS foundation that is best suited to applications 🎒.
The npm package backpack.css receives a total of 900 weekly downloads. As such, backpack.css popularity was classified as not popular.
We found that backpack.css demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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