kiso.css

A modern reset CSS designed with Japanese websites in mind.

kiso.css provides better defaults for modern web development. It standardizes browser styles, offering a consistent and solid foundation for your project.

Demo Site

Key Features

• 🇯🇵 Optimized for Japanese: Provides beautiful typography for Japanese text out-of-the-box.
• ♿ Accessibility First: Ensures accessible web design, including WCAG-compliant focus styles and forced color mode support.
• 🪶 Minimal & Sensible: Resets only what's necessary, preserving useful browser defaults and avoiding destructive styles.
• 🔧 Zero Specificity: All rules use the :where() selector for easy overriding without specificity conflicts.
• 🎯 Modern CSS: Utilizes modern CSS properties like text-wrap: pretty and scrollbar-gutter: stable.
• 🌏 Multilingual Ready: Designed with consideration for Japanese, English, and RTL languages.

Installation

Package Manager

npm install kiso.css
# or
yarn add kiso.css

Import it into your main CSS file:

@import "kiso.css";

/* Your styles here */

CDN

<link
  rel="stylesheet"
  href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/kiso.css@latest/kiso.css"
/>

Core Concepts

Japanese Typography

kiso.css is built to handle Japanese text gracefully. It automatically adjusts spacing between Japanese and alphanumeric characters (text-autospace), refines line breaks (line-break: strict), and handles punctuation spacing (text-spacing-trim), which are often overlooked in other reset libraries.

Zero Specificity

By wrapping selectors in :where(), kiso.css keeps specificity at zero. This means you can easily override any style with your own classes or element selectors without resorting to !important or complex selectors.

/* This will easily override kiso.css without any specificity issues */
a {
  color: red;
}

Accessibility by Default

Accessibility is a core principle. For example, lists remain recognizable by screen readers (list-style-type: ""), and focus rings are enhanced for better visibility (:focus-visible).

Selective Reset

We avoid "over-resetting." Useful UA styles like font-weight on headings, padding on buttons, and borders on tables are preserved to reduce the amount of code you need to write. Destructive resets like appearance: none are avoided.

Contributing

Feedback and contributions are welcome! Please feel free to open an Issue or a Pull Request.

License

kiso.css is available under the MIT License.

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Note: The name "kiso" (基礎) means "foundation" in Japanese, reflecting our goal to provide a solid base for your web projects.