- Gesso (jĕs’ō)
- noun. An undercoating medium used to prepare or ‘prime’ canvas or other surfaces before painting.
One of the changes in sp v6 is Gesso, a toy and an experiment in ways to separate (or not) base CSS. It is [intended to be] not much more than a glorified “reset” for common modern browsers.
Gesso consists largely of an older version of CSS Boilerplate by Nathan Borror (who was an original developer of the much more famous and, later, complicated Blueprint CSS framework). Newer Boilerplate revisions use some px-based sizing that doesn’t yet fit well into all of our projects (looking at you, corporate IE6 stragglers…), so it suits our purposes to keep this em-based set around and up-to-date. Included are some changes I find convenient, and I excised a few things that I don’t need. Gesso includes a print-media style sheet we put together at Utopian.net Labs. After much debate, it still includes Boilerplate’s [vh]form classes for base form styles. It is available under a BSD-like license, like Boilerplate before it.
Right now, the easiest way to get Gesso is to fetch the (<50KB) sp download, wherein the base styles can be found beneath css/gesso/. A distro page just for Gesso will appear, should there be any interest outside of Utopian.net.