Battle of the CSS Frameworks | Hacker News Reader

Battle of the CSS Frameworks

capsizedesigns.com

36 pointsqhoxie12 comments

Blueprint to me seems like a conceptual step backwards. While it does still separate markup from style physically, conceptually it's just moving the layout descriptions from the HTML attributes into the classes; there's 0 semantic value to the classes. It looks like the design still ends up being tightly coupled with the markup.

The results are beautiful, and I can see how designers might find it easier to work with conceptually. But from the perspective of a programmer I find it pretty unappealing.

I agree with you that its a step backwards, but I find that I have to add divs and classes all the type to my html that are there purely for layout reasons. Browser support just isn't there yet for truly semantic markup.

blueprint is not a framework for something you should deploy a site on, it's a framework for prototyping and hacking on your layouts. the idea is to change it to something more semantic once you've figured things out (same way as an earlier article today mentioned using HSL instead of RGB for color prototyping and switching to RGB once you've figured it out).

Really, you don't need a framework to write CSS. It isn't even very helpful if you know what you're doing. For a rapid prototype, you might save yourself five minutes by using a framework, and you'll come out with crappy code that you can't use outside of the prototype.

I can see the value for wireframing, but really, the browser defaults do just as good a job in that case. This is why I've largely stopped development on my own CSS framework. If you watch the video at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/ , the main engineer states explicitly that you shouldn't be using YUI CSS for production sites.

LinkedIn uses the framework on their site, and they gave a number of great reasons why.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/06/05/implementation-focus-link...

Useful info. The author thinks BlueprintCSS + Tripoli make a great combination. I use Blueprint but in an effort to get away from understanding more, I would hate to integrate Tripoli with Blueprint myself. Does anyone have a good stock solution for such a combination?

Yes, he does :)

http://capsizedesigns.com/blog/2008/04/bluetripcss-a-fusion-...

One advantage of YUI grids over Blueprint was the ability to easily switch to fluid layouts by modifying a single DOM id. Took another look at Blueprint, though, and saw a fluid plugin is now available.

I was very dissatisfied when I used blueprint for a recent project. For a grid based layout i've found YUI grids to be a lot better.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218597

I've planned to actually look at YUI grids. This was a nice discussion, and I need to check out the others too.

This is news from April!? Interesting my Framework "Hartija" is on the list :)

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