Do you use CSS Frameworks? (blueprint/960/YAML/YUIG, etc) What's your take?

Malo in Spanish means Bad...

so if somebody recommends using a Malo framework...
we would not use it!!!
(just kidding...)

@dev_cw

see: http://www.kingcosmonaut.de/journal/3col-layout/

Actually you can use multiple floats in a line for elements such as unordered list items, particularly if you want to create a photo grid or horizontal navigation - however this can be also be achieved quite neatly with li { display:inline }. Problems can arise when you put content inside the floated elements, so this is usually an issue when your using floated divs to form your primary grid.

@therebechips: thanks for the explanation, I understand what you are saying.
BTW - the design on that site is a bit distracting, made it difficult to read and left me a bit bug-eyed

@charliez : Malo = Bad. But in popular culture Bad = Good .. it is all to hard to keep up with

I find that if I use two or more floated elements inside a fixed-width div and their total width is exactly the space available, Firefox will often jumble the rightmost element below the others (maybe every other page load). If I leave at least a pixel of space, however, it lays out properly, and floating the last one to the right helps also. I used to love floats but now I rely on them much less and use absolute positioning much more (especially useful for having the most important content first in the code even if it’s not at the top visually).

After a year of watching (and not using) Blueprint, I finally took the plunge and settled on BlueTrip (http://bluetrip.org/). It’s a mix of Blueprint’s form with Tripoli’s typography. I’ve been using it alone for about 3 months now and I love it. Here’s one of the sites I used it on: http://med.uth.tmc.edu/comm/

I was *very* skeptical about using frameworks, but once I did, I witnessed what a time-saver it is. Not to mention, I can now code complex layouts without having to hack up new CSS every time I want a new column added.

Now for an opinion after using a framework (nothing like a little experience to shape your opinion). I am in the process of building a freebie site and did not want to spend too much time with the markup and figured that this would be a great opportunity to test out a css framework. My test subject was BlueTrip. Total time from paper sketch to a <div> frame was about 30min (and much of that was simply figuring it out). It took another hour or so to finish up the styling and do some IE styling. There only thing that I did find a bit troublesome to deal with were the 10px margins, if you want to align something flat against a border you need to do a little creative thinking like negative margins or positioning.

I am not sure BlueTrip will be my final choice, I really like the framework but I did not like that the typography and grid are bundled in the same file. It seems that having them isolated makes more sense and may provide more flexibility. On the other hand it would be very easy to split the document if needed.

So my opinion is that they are definitely a great tool and make framing a site a snap. The trade off with semantics is arguable. I don’t think that I will use a framework for every project, but it is a good thing to know about. Now if there could only be a navigation framework

Quote from: dev_cw at Dec 16, 2008, 02:51 PM

My test subject was BlueTrip.

Thanks for the update Shane. Any reason why you chose BlueTrip over the others mentioned here? Thanks.

/k

I chose BT since it is...

A full featured and beautiful CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) framework which combined the best of Blueprint, Tripoli (hence the name), Hartija’s print stylesheet, 960.gs’s simplicity, and Elements’ icons, and has now found a life of its own.

I liked 960’s grid but it did not have a typography companion, also I prefer the 10px margins over the 20px margins in 960 (but 960 has a more flexible grid but almost the same syntax as BT). I liked Blueprint but BT had nicer Typography. I could not understand Tripoli, I don’t think they have a grid system? I opted out of Emsatic since the reported IE issues. BT was the most straight forward, get it all in one place framework I found. All I needed was there. With the others I would be tempted to gather bits from one or another and end up with a mess.

One thing I liked in BT was that 1em = 10px which is great for fast calculations. I did not see how others treat the conversion factor, so this could be a mute point.

I wanted to use xWisdom’s Raxan as it is also a javascript platform, but the learning curve was too steep for this quick project (but I will definitely dig deeper into this since it seems like a great tool). Very cool to put js and css under the same package

My concerns about BT are about it originating as a mashup, but after reading up on it it seems that the author has taken it beyond into a life of it’s own. I have another freebie and a personal site to work on over the holidays and I will be using BT for sure (or maybe Raxan if I get some time to try it out).

Thanks......this certainly gives me a good starting point....

cheers/k

One thing I liked in BT was that 1em = 10px which is great for fast calculations. I did not see how others treat the conversion factor, so this could be a mute point.

I did a bunch of tests a few years ago and came to the conclusion that anything under global 1em = 12px (ie setting the body tag to .75em) will lead to rounding errors in the pixel size of type, meaning that for certain sizes there is a pixel difference in the rendering between Mac and PC . Of course that wasn’t with the latest generation of browsers so things may have changed.