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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 ma

by 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.

by Bjoern 18y ago

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.