4 ms·

CSS Frameworks

46 points by vladocar 18y ago

martian 18y ago
What frameworks do other YC folks use? I've been running with Blueprint for a while now and it's working great. The simple 24-column system makes a lot of sense for layouts, but I'm not tied to it necessarily.
- mrtron 18y ago
  I am in the same boat.
tialys 18y ago
So he did a google search for CSS Frameworks? How about some reviews/positives and negatives? Why do I care about any of these?
- bdr 18y ago
  To be fair, he also searched Wikipedia. From the page: "Infact Lets start with what is framwork? A framework is a basic conceptual structure which you can use in your web-projects." From Wikipedia: "A framework is a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues."
- martian 18y ago
  I agree that the original post lacks in critique. On the other hand, he does provide a great place to start from when considering CSS frameworks. By laying them all out on the table, we should be able to have a conversation around them to flesh out their relative pros and cons. In an attempt to start a constructive conversation, I'll outline my brief experience with Blueprint. Pros for Blueprint: - 24 columns to layout the page. E.g., you could have one 12-unit column, and 2 six-unit columns. - Basic text formatting, nice line-height handling. - Some decorators like borders between columns. - When you need tables, they look good. Cons for Blueprint: - Fixed 24-column layout can be limiting in some situations. - The occasional floated item breaks layouts. - Fixed height on headers is problematic for text with line breaks. (can be overridden, I think, with height:auto) I have less experience with other frameworks.
gunderson 18y ago
Why would I take CSS advice from someone with such an exceptionally ugly blog?
qqq 18y ago
> I miss that 960.gs, i put that in my list now.. Keep it up….. Maybe this blog is his side project after his Dell tech support job. edit: check out http://hiddenpixels.com/about/ http://hiddenpixels.com/about/
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
antidaily 18y ago
I've tried both 960.gs and Blueprint. I didn't find either all that useful outside of the reset they both come with. And it felt dirty to have classes with names like span-12 and grid_8 in my code.
Bjoern 18y ago
I am not a professional web designer, but I have made a couple of webpages (15+) and never found myself in the need for a "CSS framework". Please forgive my maybe silly question, but is it worth learning Framework x,y,z in order to get the job done considering the extra effort? At what point does a Framework make sense compared to the "build everything yourself" strategy? How do these Frameworks behaive over time regarding Browser updates? Thanks for any hints and pointers.
- kaens 18y ago
  I am also not a professional web designer, although I have done some freelance work. In my experience, if you don't have a problem just writing the css yourself, you may as well just do that. Read the css specs, and do it yourself, and you should end up with cleaner, more concise css rules than you would otherwise. I would guess that a css framework would be useful if you either didn't have much experience with css and really needed to get something done, or were doing something very complex with it.
  - cschneid 18y ago
    I think that the other benefit of using a framework is the testing behind it. At least in theory, the framework will be tested across IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. That gives a bit more confidence that your basic layout won't explode on any of those platforms.
    - kaens 18y ago
      I would assume that to be true. I use a CSS-reset stylesheet which helps a lot with cross-browser compatability. It gets hard if you're looking for pixel-perfect appearance across all major browsers. Of course, the browser that is the biggest pain requiring the most non-valid CSS to render correctly is IE. I personally view the time it would take me to evaluate and learn enough CSS frameworks to make a good choice about which ones to use where is worth less than the fairly trivial amount of time it takes to write CSS rules. My opinion may change if I ever need to do something really amazing with CSS.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
sh1mmer 18y ago
I (obviously) like the YUI stuff. I think it would have been good if he'd mentioned that it: * Works the same across the Y! A-grade list (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/) such as the awesome font scaling solution (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/) * Have style sheets to normalise fonts/styling across the A-grade browsers * Plenty of documentation, demos, screen casts. I also like Eric Meyer's posts on his CSS reset stylesheet (http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/) because it nicely dissects what he has done. I've also used Blueprint from the article. That's pretty nice, I like how it's a properly FOSS project. It's a lot like the YUI CSS project but it sets up some defaults which can be handy to quick get things going. The documentation is pretty good and is a wiki on Google Code so you can add to it. I only wish it was slightly more x-browser. I might be wrong but I don't think they support quite as many things as YUI.

46 points by vladocar 18y ago

What frameworks do other YC folks use? I've been running with Blueprint for a while now and it's working great. The simple 24-column system makes a lot of sense for layouts, but I'm not tied to it necessarily.

mrtron 18y ago
I am in the same boat.

tialys 18y ago

So he did a google search for CSS Frameworks? How about some reviews/positives and negatives? Why do I care about any of these?

bdr 18y ago
To be fair, he also searched Wikipedia. From the page: "Infact Lets start with what is framwork? A framework is a basic conceptual structure which you can use in your web-projects." From Wikipedia: "A framework is a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues."
martian 18y ago
I agree that the original post lacks in critique. On the other hand, he does provide a great place to start from when considering CSS frameworks. By laying them all out on the table, we should be able to have a conversation around them to flesh out their relative pros and cons. In an attempt to start a constructive conversation, I'll outline my brief experience with Blueprint. Pros for Blueprint: - 24 columns to layout the page. E.g., you could have one 12-unit column, and 2 six-unit columns. - Basic text formatting, nice line-height handling. - Some decorators like borders between columns. - When you need tables, they look good. Cons for Blueprint: - Fixed 24-column layout can be limiting in some situations. - The occasional floated item breaks layouts. - Fixed height on headers is problematic for text with line breaks. (can be overridden, I think, with height:auto) I have less experience with other frameworks.

gunderson 18y ago

Why would I take CSS advice from someone with such an exceptionally ugly blog?

qqq 18y ago

> I miss that 960.gs, i put that in my list now.. Keep it up….. Maybe this blog is his side project after his Dell tech support job. edit: check out http://hiddenpixels.com/about/ http://hiddenpixels.com/about/

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

antidaily 18y ago

I've tried both 960.gs and Blueprint. I didn't find either all that useful outside of the reset they both come with. And it felt dirty to have classes with names like span-12 and grid_8 in my code.

Bjoern 18y ago

I am not a professional web designer, but I have made a couple of webpages (15+) and never found myself in the need for a "CSS framework". Please forgive my maybe silly question, but is it worth learning Framework x,y,z in order to get the job done considering the extra effort? At what point does a Framework make sense compared to the "build everything yourself" strategy? How do these Frameworks behaive over time regarding Browser updates? Thanks for any hints and pointers.

kaens 18y ago
I am also not a professional web designer, although I have done some freelance work. In my experience, if you don't have a problem just writing the css yourself, you may as well just do that. Read the css specs, and do it yourself, and you should end up with cleaner, more concise css rules than you would otherwise. I would guess that a css framework would be useful if you either didn't have much experience with css and really needed to get something done, or were doing something very complex with it.
- cschneid 18y ago
  I think that the other benefit of using a framework is the testing behind it. At least in theory, the framework will be tested across IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. That gives a bit more confidence that your basic layout won't explode on any of those platforms.
  - kaens 18y ago
    I would assume that to be true. I use a CSS-reset stylesheet which helps a lot with cross-browser compatability. It gets hard if you're looking for pixel-perfect appearance across all major browsers. Of course, the browser that is the biggest pain requiring the most non-valid CSS to render correctly is IE. I personally view the time it would take me to evaluate and learn enough CSS frameworks to make a good choice about which ones to use where is worth less than the fairly trivial amount of time it takes to write CSS rules. My opinion may change if I ever need to do something really amazing with CSS.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

sh1mmer 18y ago

I (obviously) like the YUI stuff. I think it would have been good if he'd mentioned that it: * Works the same across the Y! A-grade list (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/) such as the awesome font scaling solution (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/) * Have style sheets to normalise fonts/styling across the A-grade browsers * Plenty of documentation, demos, screen casts. I also like Eric Meyer's posts on his CSS reset stylesheet (http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/) because it nicely dissects what he has done. I've also used Blueprint from the article. That's pretty nice, I like how it's a properly FOSS project. It's a lot like the YUI CSS project but it sets up some defaults which can be handy to quick get things going. The documentation is pretty good and is a wiki on Google Code so you can add to it. I only wish it was slightly more x-browser. I might be wrong but I don't think they support quite as many things as YUI.