Semantically speaking: Why CSS frameworks make sense | Hacker News Reader

Semantically speaking: Why CSS frameworks make sense

blog.newint.org

Many of the leading minds of the “semantic Web” movement, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke ...

Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke are phenomenal designers in favor of semantic HTML elements, but they have absolutely nothing to do with "the Semantic Web."

They do not. CSS is for presentation, and presentation usually differs from site to site. That means that you either have to tweak a lot, in which case using framework does not make much sense, or you have a lot of unused code in your CSS which makes the "maintainability" point moot.

In my view CSS frameworks are the crutch for CSS challenged (as WYSIWYG HTML editors are for code challenged) and should be avoided.

I also have no idea how the word "Semantically" made its way to the title. So far from I have seen CSS frameworks add very little to the semantics, take more away, and are very likely to induce an acute case of clssitis to you HTML code. Not to mention "CSS reset" which I think was stupid idea from the very beginning.

Frameworks abstract core functionality. How much innovation do you need in making a 2-column layout?

This is true; not every little catalog site is cutting-edge design. (From experience, a lot of small companies certainly won't pay for the cutting edge.)

Who talks about cutting edge? The simpler you design is, the more overhead you get from using a framework.

You'll have to explain what you mean by "overhead" in this context. Time to build? Bandwidth? If the former, certainly wrong. If the latter, whether it's meaningful overhead depends on the framework.

Also, unpack "simple".

I am not talking about innovation. I am just saying that you dont need a framework for two column layout.

I find it hard to imagine that any experienced Web producer these days wouldn’t have some “sensible defaults,” or templates, to work from in Illustrator, Photoshop, or – more precisely – for developing HTML and CSS.

Then he must have a weak imagination.

The mistake of conflating "experienced" with "clueful". :)

There's nothing like going to visit your client and realizing that their longtime programmer built the application that processes the billing info you're sending them in I-shit-you-not GW-BASIC...

Actually, I meant that you can do very good work without defaults, as most designs require very different layout approaches. It takes far less time to build a layout from scratch than to override existing code. I notice that, for most developers, this results in a torrent of "!important"s.

You can, but you can do it more quickly with defaults if you're not doing a number of very different layouts. Not all web producers are trained designers.

I've always found pre-written CSS to get in my way, but then again, CSS is practically my first language (with clean, semantic HTML).

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