haliphax

I've been using a CSS microframework, Shoelace, for a little while now in one of my hobby projects. Recently, they began releasing beta versions of their new version and I discovered that they are moving from a CSS microframework to a full-blown web component library. I wish them luck, but it's not what I was in the market for… so I began my search for a new framework.

One of the things I liked most about Shoelace was its similarity to Bootstrap in how classes were named and the manner in which they functioned. I also rather liked that it was much, much smaller than Bootstrap and had a pretty shallow learning curve when it came to customization. It used cssnext to convert future CSS specifications into modern CSS implementations, which I just felt all warm and fuzzy about–no SASS, LESS, or any other derivative quasi-CSS languages.

The framework I have been excited about, after many hours of searching and testing, is not small. In fact, it's larger than Bootstrap, as far as I can tell. It's also not using anything like cssnext (though it is driven entirely by CSS3 variables, which is neat). Halfmoon does imitate Bootstrap's naming conventions, though. It also has a dark mode (!!) and doesn't rely on jQuery (or even Javascript, if you don't want it to) for its base functionality.

I've been playing with it for (too many) hours tonight (if it still qualifies as "night" right now…), and I've decided that I'm likely going to make the decision tomorrow to scrub my codebase of Shoelace and implement the project's front end using Halfmoon. I'll try to post again with any experiences I've had that are worth sharing–both good and bad–after I've had some more time to get my hands dirty with it.

• Halfmoon CSS framework