Shireframe

Declarative wireframes for programmers, based on open web technologies.

Table of Contents

Motivation

Sometimes, you need to communicate to other people on what your software will do and how. The most efficient way is to create wireframes to show functionality and layouts. However, if you are a programmer, it is likely that writing code is easier for you than drawing boxes in an unfamiliar graphics editor.

Shireframe allows you to create wireframes by writing HTML using your favorite IDE, preview results in your favorite browser, branch/diff/merge wireframes as code in your favorite VCS and do anything else you usually do with source code.

Shireframe includes ready-made styling for sketchy look-and-feel, a number of reusable components, and bundled great libraries to simplify your life.

Interactivity support comes for free thanks to web technologies!

Example

Live demo: http://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/examples/doodle.html

Source:

Doodle

~Me Mail Pictures

|

">

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<script src="http://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/shireframe-r.js"></script>
		<title>Doodle</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<browser-chrome>
			<div class="container-fluid">
				<div class="text-right vertical-margin">
					<a>~Me</a>
					<a>Mail</a>
					<a>Pictures</a>
					<glyphicon th></glyphicon>
					<glyphicon user></glyphicon>
				</div>
				<div class="vertical-margin">
					<row>
						<col-6 col-offset-3>
							<h1 class="text-title text-center"></h1>
							<box class="width-100 vertical-margin">|</box>
						</col-6>
					</row>
					<row>
						<col-3 col-offset-3>
							<button class="btn btn-default width-100">Doodle search</button>
						</col-3>
						<col-3>
							<button class="btn btn-default width-100">I'm feeling doodley</button>
						</col-3>
					</row>
				</div>
				<footer class="vertical-margin">
					&copy; <text-url></text-url> 2015
				</footer>
			</div>
		</browser-chrome>
	</body>
</html>

What’s inside?

Shireframe includes the following libraries:

AngularJS drives the HTML and simplifies interactivity,
jQuery handles DOM manipulation,
RequireJS loads modules and styles,
Bootstrap provides solid foundation for layout and a number of helpful utility classes,
Lodash is a great utility belt,
Google font "Kalam" which looks hand-written while supporting both normal and bold styles (a rare combination),
and FontAwesome, because it is awesome indeed.

You can use any features from these libraries, and also include and use any other JavaScript libraries you like.

Getting started

Create an HTML5 document and include a JS script.

<script src="https://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/shireframe-r.js"></script>

And just start including your content into document body. Make sure to use some bundled goodness described below.
Open your HTML5 document in your favorite browser.
Profit!

More examples

See the source code in examples folder

Live demo: http://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/examples/kitter.html

Components

Most components are actually AngularJS directives or special CSS styles.

Here’s an exhaustive list:

Settings

When including shireframe-r.js, you can add attributes to the <script> tag to modify behaviour. Available options are:

no-sketchy-filter removes line "waviness"
more to come…

Example:

<script src="http://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/shireframe-r.js" no-sketchy-filter></script>

Tags

Note	Make sure all closing elements match their opening counterparts. Remember that it doesn’t work with self-closed tags like `<this />`.^[1]

`box`

A box is just a div with a preset black border. You may use it as fake inputbox or whatever. Pipe symbol (|) may denote a cursor within such an inputbox.

<box>Hello there!|</box>
<div box>as an attribute</div>
<div class="box">class is also ok</div>

`row`, `col-`, `col-offset-`

A row, col-1 … col-12 are shorthands for Bootstrap’s grid classes row and col-xs-*. It is shorter to read and write than <div class="col-xs-1 col-xs-offset-1">.

<row>
	<col-3 col-offset-1>First column</col-3>
	<col-3>Second column</col-3>
	<b col-3>Abusing B to make third column bold</b>
</row>

`fa`, `glyphicon`

Shorthands for FontAwesome and Glyphicon classes. They also turn all attributes into prefixed classes.

<fa star></fa>
<fa gear fw 5x spin></fa>
<glyphicon user></glyphicon>

`kitten`

Inserts a random kitten photo from teh internet. Each next tag instance will have a different picture, but they persist across page reloads. Use it as a placeholder for images or user photos. Fun!

<kitten></kitten>
<kitten size="5em"></kitten>

`browser-chrome`

Wrap your content in <browser-chrome> … </browser-chrome> to have a nice fake window border with a title, address bar and nav buttons. Of course, they are fake and don’t react to clicks, but allow you to express your app environment ("my app works in a web browser").

<browser-chrome>
	Look, a kitty in my web browser: <kitten></kitten>
</browser-chrome>

This has nothing to do with with Google Chrome. It’s just any browser’s UI is frequently called chrome.^[2]

`text-title`

Shows the same thing as in your <title> or awesome default if there isn’t any title. Used in browser-chrome and potentially many other places.

<text-title></text-title>
<h1 text-title></h1>

`text-url`

Like text-title, but transforms it to fake url like http://awesome.com.

<text-url></text-url>
<a text-url></a>

`angry-comment`, `cheerful-comment`

Inserts a comment which expresses dissatisfaction or satisfaction.

<cheerful-comment></cheerful-comment>
<angry-comment></angry-comment>
<p cheerful-comment></p>

`lorem-ipsum`

Inserts a widely-known placeholder text of N characters length.

<p lorem-ipsum="100"></p>
<lorem-ipsum></lorem-ipsum>

Planned for future

❏ my-profile-photo which is the same in every tag instance
❏ random-profile-photo which is different in every tag instance
❏ random-logo an abstract shape
❏ login-form username-password (or email-password) form with a "login" button
❏ template-navbar a ready navbar will include random-logo, title, searchbar, gear button (aka settings), my-profile-photo and a logout button
❏ template-footer a ready footer will include a made-up copyright statement and a few made-up links
❏ ipad-chrome with orientation parameter
❏ ipad-browser-chrome
❏ iphone-chrome
❏ iphone-browser-chrome
❏ android-chrome
❏ mac-native-app-chrome
❏ windows-native-app-chrome
❏ nonsense random placeholder text that looks like syntactically correct English but has no meaning
❏ video-player
❏ audio-player
❏ random-pie-chart based on d3.js and c3.js
❏ random-bar-chart
❏ random-line-chart

and more… Contributions welcome!

CSS classes

With one-time wireframes that will be thrown out soon, it is likely that you won’t care about separating and reusing future-proof CSS rules. Instead, inline styles are the way to go.

That’s why I provide a number of helper classes for you to use along with Bootstrap’s tools to perform common tasks.

`h, .h`

Overrides Bootstrap’s font-weight to 600 which is supported by bundled handwriting font.

`vertical-margin`

Adds 1em vertical space to the top and bottom of your element.

<row class="vertical-margin"></row>

`overflow-auto`

An alias for style="overflow: auto"

`width-100`

An alias for style="width: 100%"

`display-block`

An alias for style="display: block"

`display-inline-block`

An alias for style="display: inline-block"

Interactivity

In the simplest form, you could create several *.html files, and link them together using <a href="…"> links. You probably know that already :-)

Another possibility is to use AngularJS directives that add behavior like ng-click. Refer to AngularJS docs for more info.

Just remember that your wireframe is an ordinary HTML page and you can do anything you want with the page.

Data-driven

TODO

Create your own reusable components / API

You can refactor your templates to reusable components. Extract bits and pieces into separate html files and register them using partials attribute on shireframe script tag.

wireframe.html:
<script src="http://rawgit.com/tsx/shireframe/master/shireframe-r.js" partials="my-partial another-partial"></script>
<my-partial></my-partial>
<another-partial>My content</another-partial>

my-partial.html:
<b>Hey, I'm partial!</b>

another-partial.html:
<i>Here's your content: <ng-transclude></ng-transclude></i>

Including other scripts & code

TODO

Browser support

Shireframe uses cutting-edge web technologies, so only evergreen browsers are supported. Safari, Chrome, Firefox are ok. Sorry, IE users.

Also, SVG filter which is used to distort wireframe for "sketchy" look is completely broken on iOS, so you have to opt-out of filtering or use pre-rendered images to show wireframes on iPads and iPhones.

Render to PNG

There’s a script included in make-screenshot directory which will render a hi-res version of your wireframe.

shireframe/make-screenshot/make-screenshot.sh http://wherever.your/wireframe/is.html render.jpg

To make it work, you have to install PhantomJS 2.0 (1.x branch won’t work) and ImageMagick.^[3]

On Mac OS X with MacPorts, the following commands will bring in everything you need.

sudo port install phantomjs
sudo port install ImageMagick

License

This project is licensed under the terms of GNU GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2) or later.

Shireframe is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the impliged warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Contributing

Fork, hack, push and pull-request. Contributions welcome!

Also, please help spreading the word and freeing your fellow colleague programmers from having to struggle with mouse-driven graphics editors.

Why the name?

W in wireframe looks like Cyrillic Ш (sh). That’s it.

Author

Vyacheslav Tverskoy <tsx@tsx.su>

If you have any questions, feedback or just want to say thanks, ping me at Twitter @tsxxst

1. angular/angular.js#1953

2. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/browser-and-gui-chrome/

3. PhantomJS seems to ignore SVG filters, so ImageMagick is used instead to achieve the same effect

Sep	OCT	Nov
	23
2024	2025	2026

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 27 Commits
examples		examples
make-screenshot		make-screenshot
.gitignore		.gitignore
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.adoc		README.adoc
browserChrome.html		browserChrome.html
dev-server.js		dev-server.js
fonts.js		fonts.js
package.json		package.json
shireframe-config.js		shireframe-config.js
shireframe-r.js		shireframe-r.js
shireframe.css		shireframe.css
shireframe.js		shireframe.js

License

tsx/shireframe

Folders and files

Latest commit

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Shireframe

Motivation

Example

What’s inside?

Getting started

More examples

Components

Settings

Tags

box

row, col-, col-offset-

fa, glyphicon

kitten

browser-chrome

text-title

text-url

angry-comment, cheerful-comment

lorem-ipsum

Planned for future

CSS classes

h*, .h*

vertical-margin

overflow-auto

width-100

display-block

display-inline-block

Interactivity

Data-driven

Create your own reusable components / API

Including other scripts & code

Browser support

Render to PNG

License

Contributing

Why the name?

Author

About

Topics

Resources

License

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Packages 0

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Contributors 4

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Languages

`box`

`row`, `col-`, `col-offset-`

`fa`, `glyphicon`

`kitten`

`browser-chrome`

`text-title`

`text-url`

`angry-comment`, `cheerful-comment`

`lorem-ipsum`

`h, .h`

`vertical-margin`

`overflow-auto`

`width-100`

`display-block`

`display-inline-block`

Packages