Important to know, I suppose...
But if you are building a quick app or prototype, I've found frameworks like blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) to be quite helpful.
But if you are building a quick app or prototype, I've found frameworks like blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) to be quite helpful.
Honestly, in my experience:
- The time you invest in learning the ropes of that framework would be better invested in properly learning CSS. I wouldn't say this of any framework in any language, but CSS is easy and, contrarily to what I constantly hear, it isn't that hard to master.
- Once you know CSS well, it's much faster to convert a PSD by hand than trying to make it work with your framework. The more detailed the actual design, the more this applies.
- The only pseudo-framework that actually boosts styling speed is leveraging a well-maintained css reset stylesheet.
Keep in mind that this is coming from somebody that knows CSS well... I understand why a framework sounds appealing, especially since we have a lot of them on the development side, but in the case of CSS, it is total overkill.
The problem with other peoples frameworks is, well... they're other peoples frameworks. Develop your own and you'll love it. Such frameworks allow you to factor your CSS and eliminate repetition and patterns you use often.
Do you have any advice for dealing with this? I feel there ought to be some way of semi-automatically "refactoring" style sheets, or keeping them compact and neat to begin with, but I haven't yet found it.
CSS frameworks are different from other programming frameworks because it overwrites defaults. It is equivalent to something like overriding printf in c to do add an extra character at the beginning. Its just ridiculous.
It's not like it is really that complicated to make it work from there... If you think it is, learn CSS properly (i.e. stop cutting corners!).
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