Mai is a baseline CSS framework written in SASS. Its main purpose is to provide simplistic cross-browser normalization, a responsive grid (which is currently a nearly-copy-paste of Foundation 5's grid) and some sane typographical defaults at its core, while all other functionality will be made available as optional plugins/widgets.
In development (read: unusable)
It is currently in its design phase and therefore considered unusable. We have used its past iterations internally for numerous projects but are in the process of restructuring it to be more modular and extensible to make it somewhat compatible with either Foundation or Bootstrap (tbd).
You've been warned.
Installation
Mai is available as a Compass plugin.
Grab it with:
gem install mai
Require it by adding the respective line to your Compass config (config.rb
or whatever you use):
require 'mai'
And install it as a Compass plugin (at the command line):
compass install mai
This will yield a master.sass
file in your configured sass_dir with an example and some documentation on how to import
Mai and its modules. An index.html
file referencing the built master.css
file (ie. with a preview of what the example
master.sass
generates) will also be generated in your project's root directory.
Design principles
- Mobile first;
- End-user first, designer second (1kb of additional data per request, stretched over thousands/millions of requests is a lot compared to forcing the designer to spend a few extra seconds to import only what's really needed);
- Provide the kitchen sink but hide it in a maze so that it's available only when absolutely required;
- Make it flexible, easy to configure and easy to override. When an !important is required within your final stylesheet in order to override Mai, it means we suck;
Browser support
- Prefixes: Mai completely avoids vendor prefixes if a standard W3C equivalent is available. In order to provide support for the browser version you are targeting we suggest using Autoprefixer which comes in many flavours for various compilation/deployment tools.