Volt is a monorepo centered around the VoltX.js runtime, a lightweight, declarative alternative to component-centric UI frameworks. The repo also ships VoltX.css, a classless css framework for prototyping, the Volt CLI and the documentation site that demonstrates and explains the runtime.

Philosophy/Goals

• Behavior is declared via data-volt-* attributes
  • HTML drives the UI, not components
• Core under 20 KB gzipped, zero dependencies
• Signals update the DOM directly without a virtual DOM
  • Native Server-Sent Events (SSE) and WebSocket patch updates
  • No reactivity scheduler, no VDOM diffing
• Extend behavior declaratively (persist, scroll, animate, etc.)
• Progressive enhancement, i.e. works with static HTML out of the box

Values

• Never exceed 15 KB for the core (gzipped) runtime
• Work with any backend
• All source in TypeScript, no DSL or external dependencies
• Every feature ships with a test harness

Concepts

Concept	Description
Signals	Reactive primitives that automatically update DOM bindings when changed
Bindings	data-volt-text, data-volt-html, data-volt-class connect attributes or text to expressions
Actions	data-volt-on-click, data-volt-on-input, etc. attach event handlers declaratively
Streams	data-volt-stream="/events" listens for SSE or WebSocket updates and applies JSON patches
Plugins	Modular extensions (data-volt-persist, data-volt-surge, data-volt-shift, etc.) to enhance the core

VoltX.css

VoltX ships with an optional classless CSS framework inspired by Pico CSS and Tufte CSS. It provides beautiful, semantic styling for HTML elements without requiring any CSS classes - just write semantic markup and it looks great out of the box.

Features include typography with modular scale, Tufte-style sidenotes, styled form elements, dialogs, accordions, tooltips, tables, and more.

Getting Started

• Runtime usage: see lib/README.md for installation guides and quick-start examples
• Local development: pnpm install then pnpm --filter lib dev run package-specific scripts (build, test, etc.)
• Documentation: pnpm --filter docs docs:dev launches the VitePress site

Status

Pre-release software in active development. Expect breaking changes until v1.0 and evaluate before using in production.