alt.hn

4/3/2026 at 3:49:08 PM

Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM

 https://github.com/0xGF/boneyard

by steveharing1

4/7/2026 at 8:01:24 PM

No examples, no mention of why someone would want this, site is broken on mobile.

by junon

4/7/2026 at 8:29:36 PM

Hm... A Twitter comment is not documentation, but:

> every skeleton screen you've ever hand-coded is a waste of time

> you're literally measuring padding and guessing widths to build a worse version of a layout that already exists in your DOM

> so I made a package that just reads the real one

Linked from the readme.

by gavmor

4/8/2026 at 6:20:20 AM

I've never personally seen a skeleton screen. I don't know why anyone would need this, and struggling to think of what problems are solved by them.

by junon

4/8/2026 at 8:22:10 AM

You may have seen.

https://i.postimg.cc/qqCYtL6V/Screenshot-2026-04-08-134800.j...

The pic above is representation of skeleton screen on youtube.com when opened in browser

Placeholder with same dimension or colors as actual content, which will get replaced it keep user engaged rather having a blank screen that suddenly fills or spinners.

by G_o_D

4/8/2026 at 8:37:53 AM

Ahhh okay, have never seen it called that before. Thanks!

by junon

4/8/2026 at 10:54:55 AM

Thanks, I had not heard this term before.

Been working on websites on and off since 1999

by stuaxo

4/7/2026 at 8:12:20 PM

But it has animated logo (that you have to click on to start) and chart of GitHub stars progression in time!

by dvh

4/7/2026 at 8:28:35 PM

This is cool but I'm confused - it says it generates the bones at "build time" not at "runtime." But you're calling this headless bone generator while your app is running, right? That sounds like runtime.

by smokedetector1

4/7/2026 at 8:47:05 PM

I have no idea what this means, and I don't think I'm alone. Make a video dammit.

by m000

4/7/2026 at 10:58:05 PM

Seems interesting, but I wonder how this would be better than just asking an LLM to implement the skeletons?

For most components, current generation models should be able to understand the component code and produce skeletons that occupies exactly the same space

by rzkyif

4/8/2026 at 3:50:08 AM

I do this often, and they do! Yours is the same question I had.

by CharlesW

4/7/2026 at 10:34:38 PM

I don't like skeletons that much but it's really creative to have the headless browser inspect your running dev env and capture element size & placement snapshots.

by bedroom_jabroni

4/7/2026 at 9:05:04 PM

Their doc linked at the bottom actually has a pretty nice example.

https://boneyard.vercel.app/how-it-works

by simongr3dal

4/8/2026 at 9:07:36 AM

Appreciate this! For anyone looking for examples of skeletons it generates, you can visit their doc

by steveharing1

4/7/2026 at 8:44:11 PM

I love seeing things that support Svelte.

by nozzlegear

4/8/2026 at 12:17:48 AM

Am I understanding this right - in order to make ‘accurate’ placeholder content, it preloads the actual content, then uses that to guide the appearance of the placeholder content, that it shows while you’re waiting for your actual content to load…

Was this an April fools joke?

by mock-possum

4/7/2026 at 10:07:26 PM

I was going to say it seems potentially useful, but engagement stats for this on Github and X seem unnatural and the anon crypto author makes it a hard no for me

by evantbyrne