Choosing The Best CSS Framework: A Complete Guide | Hacker News Reader

Choosing The Best CSS Framework: A Complete Guide

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46 pointsvladocar19 comments

Another survey article, with no conclusions or recommendations... No pros/cons covered, somebody have a good _review_ rather than a survey?

Just go with Compass and be done with ;-) It admittedly makes deploys a little more annoying though (particularly if you aren't already using Ruby).

I just use Compass with a sample index.html to get the styles right, then punt the generated CSS sideways into whatever project I'm working on. Makes things nice and simple.

If I find a weird corner case where the style breaks, I add that to the index.html as a test case and repeat.

> But it can also be a steep learning curve to figure out which framework you should use (or if you should use one at all) and then how to use it.

I was really looking forward to hear someone talk about this.

I'd like to know more about whether or not I should be using one at all. I've found CSS frameworks useful for mockups or prototyping, but I'm concerned that they're too heavy and general-purpose to use in production.

That's what I've found too. The value of a css framework comes from showing you a structured way to achieve certain things, eg grid based design, font scaling. Once you know how to do that, you don't need the framework and it's probably just as easy to write the css directly.

I've found the best way to use them is a starting point. By the time your site goes live you've stripped out the rules you don't need and customised the names of the classes etc so you can't see much of the original framework.

Has anyone had any success using a framework, then removing the excess CSS with something like deadweight? ( http://railscasts.com/episodes/180-finding-unused-css )

Choosing seems even harder nowadays, what with SASS, LessCSS, CleverCSS, etc.

I've been using Compass, a set of SASS libraries that (among other things) re-implements Blueprint. I love Compass; I like SASS a bit less (especially where syntax is concerned.)

http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/

Luckily for you, Sass 3 will have a new CSS-like syntax. You can even use it right now if you want: http://github.com/nex3/haml/commits/scss. I believe it works great with the Compass 0.10 prerelease.

I've been using YUI Grids for a couple of years and it simplified my CSS. I use it to "reset" all the default rules for the browsers so that things like font sizes and spacing appears uniform between the browsers. Then I use it to set up an initial grid layout for the base columns and rows of the site.

I moved from YUI to jQuery because I wanted to use a lighter framework, but I've continued to use YUI CSS because it's still pretty tight.

However, I hope that YUI does look into add compatibility for HTML5 tags because that is something that is lacking.

If I'm doing a simple, non-CMS site I'll use custom Blueprint CSS generated by Boks: http://toki-woki.net/p/Boks/.

I like blueprint, but I always feel like I am getting into nested div hell as you can't add padding to its grid. Either that or I am doing something wrong.

Pull or push don't do what you want?

blueprint is awesome, it comes with bulit-in typography and you can also have plugins

Help a noob - Are these helpful at all for building CMS based sites - like on wordpress or shopify? Or are they mostly just for making standalone sites?

I've used YUI Grids to build both Drupal and WordPress sites. It's pretty straight forward and definitely easier than trying to customize an existing CMS template/theme.

Everything on Grid Based Designs and the appropriate tools can be found here: http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/grid-based-design-toolbox/

Any recommendations to use with a GWT application?

I think the answer would depend more on the nature of your particular application than whether or not you're using GWT. Was there anything about GWT that leads you to suspect otherwise?

I cannot pin point what is different with GWT. May be I just need to try one the css frameworks to see if I get a better insight.

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