(Simple, Clean, Modern) Open Source Web Design Template?
December 9, 2012 9:49 PM   Subscribe

I occasionally contribute tutorials to open source projects and I'm looking for a standard Web page template I can use for these. Although I know HTML/CSS and could write one from scratch, I'd rather spend that time writing more (or better) documentation for the projects. Do you know of any simple, nice looking, open source templates I could use?

The ideal template would be:
  1. Free: no cost and either is in the public domain or has a very liberal license like Apache. Requiring attribution is OK, but it's better if it can be in the page source instead of visible to the end user (my name doesn't go on the tutorial either)
  2. Modern: works 100% in all browsers common today and gracefully degrades for older ones
  3. Simple: Doesn't use gratuitous Javascript or define a zillion CSS classes. Ideally, the CSS would be small enough to include directly in the page's <head> element so there's just one file.
  4. Attractive: Github's Wiki markup wins here, but fails at simplicity
If there's support for code syntax highlighting (especially Java, UNIX Shell, Python and R), that would be a big plus.
posted by tomwheeler to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Have you looked at Bootstrap? It does CSS reset, typography and offers a set of standard layouts. Bootstrap is incredibly flexible but there's also overhead issues and the docs are a bit lacking.

I use a modified version of Bootstrap that fetches the css and js files from various CDNs which makes the pages load even faster (lost of sites use the Google hosted files so chances are that the files are already cached by the browser).
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:27 PM on December 9, 2012


I'll add a vote for Bootstrap. It's crazy easy to start using. You'll find that the entire kit-n-kaboodle is a fair amount of collateral, but as FfA mentions above, a CDN-ified version will be pretty speedy. You can also build your own Bootstrap that includes only the bits you want.
posted by raena at 2:01 AM on December 10, 2012


I've seen a fair bit of documentation using Bootstrap - so I'll third that. Another idea might be to write it in Markdown, that way you get a text version, and an HTML version.
posted by backwards guitar at 3:53 AM on December 10, 2012


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