Note NIH maybe :)
Although I normally avoid carousels I'm sometimes required to include them. There are a couple of excellent options (see below), but most of those opt for features over filesize. This is fine, of course. It's just that I often don't need 50% of the features and would rather have a very simple, modular script. Including a carousel plugin that requires dozens of KB's simply to make something 'slideable' seems wasteful.
Strangely enough I've not found many robust carousels that are simple, modular and lightweight... (Currently http://unslider.com/ (see below) seems to come pretty close)
This started me thinking: "What would I look for in 'the simplest possible carousel'?"
- Responsive or go home
- Keyboard Accessible at least. Touch support with simple plugin?
- For modern browsers (PE obviously, but no 10kb dealing with IE8)
- Flexbox ? to avoid many float bugs
- Markup agnostic but valid ( etc)
- Styling/Animation through CSS
- < 10kb or choose a full-featured robust alternative
- ...
- Vertical carousels
- Thumbnail navigation
- ...
The following carousel scripts are quite good. They provide lots of options and features but this comes at a price: dependancies and file-size. Still: check them out.
- http://kenwheeler.github.io/slick/ (~34kb ex. CSS)
- http://flickity.metafizzy.co/ (~55kb ex. CSS. *Some bundling options)
- http://owlgraphic.com/owlcarousel/ (~24kb ex. CSS)
The following carousel scripts are lightweight (but do not completely satisfy my requirements one way or another):
- http://unslider.com/ (~5kb ex. CSS Seems a pretty good option, honestly)
- http://baijs.com/tinycarousel/ (~2.5kb ex. CSS buggy)
Also, my personal peeve with carousels is those little dots indicating more slides.