Can you make a website without using CSS?
YES, you can make a website without using CSS, but the website will be unresponsive and ugly. CSS gives a website its beauty, it defines how HTML elements should be displayed. All the coloring, sizing, alignments, and other general styles of a website are done using CSS.
If you want to build a modern, responsive, and good-looking website, you need to use CSS. CSS is easy to learn and simple to implement. It is very descriptive and you will easily understand what you are doing. HTML, CSS, and Javascript are the fundamental technologies of all websites.
The image below is a good example to help you understand what CSS is, and what it does.
According to W3Techs, “CSS is used by 96.8% of all the websites.” This means that there is still a 3.2% of all websites that do not use CSS. Meaning there are quite a number of websites that have been made without using CSS.
Although CSS is easy to work with, there are times you will have trouble implementing exactly what you want. In this case, you can use CSS frameworks. Frameworks make it easy to write and work with CSS, you can make a website responsive without writing any CSS media queries.
Here are some of the popular CSS Frameworks that you can use to make styling your website easy.
Bootstrap is one of the most popular CSS Frameworks, it is an open-source toolkit that helps you to quickly design and customize responsive mobile-first sites. It makes styling your website easy and fun. Bootstrap also comes with powerful Javascript Plugins to help you add extra features to your website.
Materialize CSS is a modern responsive CSS framework based on Material Design by Google. It will help you speed up your development and make a beautiful website in no time. Just adding Materialize CSS to your website in the header and using it in the body makes your website responsive without any other extra work.
Tailwind CSS is a utility first CSS framework that helps you to build a modern website quickly and easily. You will be able to implement a lot of styling using classes like flex, text-center, rotate-90, font-medium, rounded-full, etc. it is so descriptive and easy to implement.
“Bulma is a free, open-source framework that provides ready-to-use frontend components that you can easily combine to build responsive web interfaces.” It is easy to use and will make styling a website seem effortless.
Foundation does most of the heavy lifting for you. It is packed with features to help you rapidly build content-focused websites. Foundation is easy to customize and has great code snippets and templates to help you get started.
If you are not interested in writing CSS or using CSS frameworks and libraries, you can use website builders to make and style your website. In this way, you don’t have to write any CSS and you can style your website visually by choosing features and styles that you want and by drag and drop.
You can use website builders to make blogs, E-commerce Sites, News sites, Forums, Membership sites, social media sites, video platforms, etc. You can style all of these without writing CSS. Some of the popular website Builders include Bubble, WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.
IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE TO CSS?
CSS is the standard and there is currently (2022) no alternative to CSS. All the other technologies that are considered alternatives to CSS such as Less, SCSS, Bootstrap, Stylus, DTCSS, and many others will all boil down to plain old CSS.
The future is always uncertain and maybe, in time to come, (not anytime soon) there will be an alternative to CSS. For now, CSS is the king and the only option.
CONCLUSION
It can be seen that you can build a website without CSS. There are about 3.2% of websites on the internet that are built without using CSS. However, you need to understand that a website built without CSS will not be responsive and the UI will not be visually appealing, it will be ugly and unattractive.
To make styling a website easy, you can use CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap, Materialize CSS, Tailwind CSS, Foundation, Bulma, Skeleton, Semantic UI, etc. Website builders can also help you to style your website visually.