I understand the "starting point" part but I find the emphasis on "classless" interesting: you basically have to introduce a non-element selector as soon as you want make even the smallest layout change.

For anything beyond a single page document, I find something like matcha.css (https://matcha.mizu.sh, you can even pick your custom build on the same page) a practical starting point if you want to stay close to the elements.

Reminds me of this website for checking classless stylesheets.

https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

I’m surprised how few of them support dark mode.

IMHO today dark mode support is part of reasonable defaults.

Love the idea. It's really painful to cycle through every theme. Would be great to have a way to scroll through them directly, though... that would result in a bigger bundle, and I respect the hustle

Some really unexpected domain redirects for this one for some reason: https://www.cssbed.com/vanillacss

All the others are as you'd expect.

For me it is definitely Pico.css. Honorable mentions: simple.css, tacit, w3c-chocolate.

I had a server-side app made for personal stuff, and pico.css drop-in is a pretty good baseline for an usable UI/page. Also visited some web hosts and their sites look perfectly serviceable with Bootstrap. I think it's a good way to railroad some of the more egregious things LLMs might do with regards to CSS.

Interesting. Having made websites I think "of course that makes sense!". As a practical matter, getting wanted page appearance can require adding a few classes. I've been guilty of class proliferation caused by perfectionistic tweaking of things to the last nanogram. Anymore I strive not to go there.

[2019]

But might be due a revival on the shoulders of LLMs.

It's sad that most of these themes makes buttons not look like buttons.

Eye opener. I think I looked through almost all of them and none got basic typography right such as less margin bottom beneath a heading (to the paragraph following it) than above.

Many had zero left/right margins on mobile.

Overall terrible defaults.

Correct terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_style_sheet

I love classless CSS for rapid hand prototyping. LLMs are making this increasingly less necessary, but it's still great for creating tiny, performant CSS pages and some of the smaller ones can even be inlined in fewer bytes than it takes to make a 2nd round trip to the server to check if the asset has been updated. This is one of my secret weapons for creating web apps that load and render so fast you can feel the difference!