Starter theme
A clean start, accessible from the first commit
Kaishi is a starter theme that borrows Apple's restraint — a translucent sticky header, pill controls, generous type — and holds every colour pair to WCAG AAA rather than AA.
Built for shipping quickly
No build toolchain
No npm install, no bundler, no lockfile. Edit Markdown, run one binary, deploy the folder.
Nothing phones home
No CDN, webfont host, analytics or tag manager. There is nothing to disclose in a cookie banner.
Accessible by default
Colour tokens are gated at AAA for text; keyboard paths and focus states are checked in CI.
Search included
The generator injects an accessible search dialog with a live-region result count. The theme skins it.
Feeds included
RSS, Atom and JSON Feed are generated from the same content and linked in the document head.
One file to re-skin
The whole palette is a token block at the top of styles.css. Change it, run the gate.
Who this is for
Kaishi suits a first site: a personal page, a small product, or the public face of an open-source project. It gives you Apple's visual restraint without the research, and an accessibility floor you cannot accidentally fall through.
If you need a case-study portfolio, use Apex. For long-form writing or research, use Atlas. For documentation, use Lucid.
What makes it Kaishi
The look rests on three details, all of them tokens rather than markup:
- A translucent header. The masthead blurs the page behind it, but only where
backdrop-filteris supported. Everywhere else it stays opaque, so the contrast pair the gate verifies is the pair that ships. - Pill controls. Buttons use a 980px radius rather than
50%, so a wide button keeps semicircular ends instead of turning into an ellipse. - Soft cards. A 24px corner and a barely-there shadow, rather than a border doing all the work.
Accessibility
Every colour pair in this theme is checked at AAA (7:1) for text by scripts/contrast.py in CI — not AA, and not by eye. Dark mode is checked as its own palette, which is where themes usually fail: a muted grey that reads well on white is often invisible on black.
What "no build step" means
There is no package.json. The stylesheet is hand-authored CSS using cascade layers and custom properties, which every target browser supports natively. The two JavaScript files total under 4 KB and are plain ES5 — no transpiler, no polyfill, no module graph.
To work on the theme you run the generator and refresh. That is the whole loop.
Extending it
Adding a page is two files: a Markdown file in content/ and a layout in _layouts/ that opens with {{#extends "base"}}. The header, footer and document shell come along automatically, so a new page starts at about eight lines.