Let's start with some history. Back in 2002, when I star---
Eh, everybody already heard this. Old man yells at cloud. Complaining that before a webpage had 50 kB, now it has 5 MB, still taking ten seconds to load, even though the connections are hundreds times faster. But why is that? Because nobody cares.
I am a GPU developer. My usual Mondays are about having a handful of milliseconds to do complex image processing in real time. So I am furious if a page that presents mainly text takes seconds to appear on my screen. And I would despise myself for presenting GPU-related content using such tools. So I made this thing. This thing has no JavaScript, just a few kilobytes of pure CSS and is meant to be used with static site generators.
.. note-danger:: Warning: opinions
This page presents my opinions. Not everybody likes my opinions.
Responsive page layout? Yes! Popup menus? Check! Expanding hamburger navigation? Sure! With pure CSS features, supported for years by all browsers. The goal of this framework is presenting content in the most unobtrusive and lightweight way possible --- if you are looking for something that would display a spinner while the megabytes are loading, something that can open a "#" popup on page load or interrupt the reading experience with a noisy full-page ad every once a while, this is not what you are looking for.
.. note-info::
Well, while m.css itself doesn't *need* JavaScript, it doesn't prevent
*you* from using it --- put in as many jQueries as you want.
The stylesheets consist of only three files, written in pure CSS. No CSS preprocessor needed --- in my experience the main reason for a preprocessor was an ability to use variables, but that's implemented in CSS itself with universal support across browsers, so why bother? Besides that, the files are so small that there's no need for any minification --- server-side compression is simply good enough.
.. note-dim::
Actually, in order to support old Edge versions and IE, I *had to* create a
*post*\ processed versions of the CSS files. But that still doesn't prevent
you from using pure CSS.
If you are like me, you want a website that presents your main work, not that your main work is presenting websites. So remove the unneeded hassle of paying extra for a dynamic webhosting, installing and maintaining a huge CMS and patching it twice a month for a neverending stream new CVEs. Together with Pelican, m.css provides a solution harnessing the endless possibilities of your local machine to generate a bunch of static HTML files, which you can then upload anywhere. And as a bonus, you have the full control over your content --- nothing's hidden in opaque databases.
.. note-success::
This is all optional, though --- m.css can work with a dynamic CMS below as
well. Or with your hand-written HTML. Not sure about WYSIWYG editors, tho.
I love Python and while I'm probably not very good at it (having spent over a decade writing purely C++), I wanted to finally put it into practical use, instead of learning a completely new language. There I also discovered reStructuredText, which, compared to various flavors of Markdown, is very well thought out, amazingly flexible and easily extensible to support everything I need.
.. note-warning::
By all means, use Jekyll or Hugo, if you want --- but I can't promise that
all the :abbr:`reST <reStructuredText>` extensions I did are transferrable
elsewhere.
To underline that this project is driven by a need for a simple, tiny, nameless low-maintenance thing to power my websites. That my focus is on presenting content with it, not on shifting my career back to web development to flesh this thing out to be the Greatest Web Framework Ever™.
.. note-primary::
Contributions welcome, though! Does it look like I'm not putting enough
effort in? Submit an improvement! Make a difference
:gh:`over at GitHub <mosra/m.css/issues/new>`. Both the m.css code and
contents of this site are public, available under the MIT license.