Onehub: Why We Chose 960.gs for Our CSS Framework

onehub.com

8 points·charlesmount··3 comments

Yeah, I know you discuss that the tradeoff is "worth it", but if you're writing CSS classes like that you lose a lot of the ability to redesign your site in the future without restructuring markup. The whole point of using CSS in the first place is to separate style from markup. The classes might still be "descriptive", but you're definitely putting style right there in your markup.

If you're set on using a CSS framework, I really think Compass (http://compass-style.org/) is a must. However, the syntax is so wacko I can see anyone's aversion to it.

A definitive solution to this problem has yet to emerge.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I haven't felt the need to use a CSS framework. Then again, I self-taught myself CSS layout-based design in 2003 in the dark days, and was tasked with teaching a lot of co-workers how to do it when mainstream sites started transitioning to CSS layout based designs around 2004/2005. Perhaps I'm a grey beard in this domain.

But to me, CSS frameworks introduce a lot of cruft to a task that, once learned, is not very difficult. If people are writing stylesheets that are unmaintainable, it means they aren't sufficiently proficient at CSS. I've been there, even after I'd declared I was proficient at CSS. A few years on, my stylesheets are fractions of the size of the ones I used to write and do more than those ones too.

I can't stand class names changing all the time: class_name, className, class-name. Man, pickup one and stick to it.

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