Why Skeleton

What is Skeleton?

Skeleton is a UI library, featuring tight integration between Svelte and Tailwind CSS. In short, the library utilizes Tailwind’s utility class-based design system to quickly and easily customize and extend the look and feel of each component. Paired with Svelte’s powerful component architecture, Skeleton creates customized, responsive, and reactive interfaces for any size project.

Advantages

Let’s face it - creating consistent and responsive interfaces for the web can be quite a challenge. This led to the emergence of UI toolkits such as Bootstrap, Material Design, and Bulma. These allow developers to generate a consistent UI for web apps within any frontend tech stack. However, these toolkits only solve half the problem - they provide beautiful UI, but in most cases lack the accompanying functionality needed to make interactive components for your preferred framework, leaving that burden on you. In some cases, they may also require extra dependencies, which can introduce choice paralysis when filtering through the plethora of options in modern frontend development.

This has given rise to the framework-specific component libraries such as: Angular Material for Angular, Vuetify for Vue, and Mantine for React. These tools aim to be a complete solution that goes beyond the surface level and allows for direct integration of framework features, while providing fully interactive components, typically without the need to introduce extra packages and dependencies.

Like many in the frontend development community, we have been impressed with the introduction of Svelte - which provides a modern and powerful component system. Along with the SvelteKit app framework, that provides a turnkey solution for building and iterating on web projects using Svelte and next generation tooling such as Vite. However, we’ve noted a lack of mature Svelte-focused UI component libraries. While there’s plenty of options, most tend to focus on Material Design guidelines and aesthetics. While a completely valid approach, we felt there was still room for a batteries included toolkit that pairs the very best of what Svelte and Tailwind have to offer. This is the reason we've introduced Skeleton.

Free and Open Source

Skeleton is available as free and open-source software (FOSS) provided under the MIT License.