Russell and Associates - Forum

Recently, I began using the 960grid and Blueprint CSS frameworks.

For fast page prototyping, these css libraries (i.e. grid frameworks) are very useful.  I did notice many issues when attempting to use more complex layouts – there is little room for any deviations, such as adding borders (Blueprint in particular)!

That is when I began adding float-fixes and other css classes to compensate for the issues inherent in these CSS frameworks.

This begged the question - did this truly save me time over a custom css framework based on the specific page layout?

Yes, I do believe it did save time.  The basic page structure can be created super-fast.   I didn’t have to worry about any heavy lifting just to get a container, subcontainers, and ribbon menus aligned and floated properly.  It was just a matter of adding a class definition for the element (<div id=’mydiv’ class=’span-6′>).

NOTE: I trashed the YUI layout grid trial – too much overhead for my taste.  That is not a critique, but I love jQuery and don’t want to integrate another JS lib for a basic grid system.  If I am incorrect in my assumption – and someone can point me in the direction of simplistic get-er-up-and-running-fast documentation (versus Yahoo!’s rather messy but comprehensive docs), I will invest an afternoon.

I will go into more detail as time permits, and I am going to try the YUI layout grid system.  Then I will do a comprehensive analysis of the features and drawbacks of each.

I will also cover how the following jQuery stacks integrate with each framework:

• jQuery UI
• jQuery plugins

Thanks,

Vic.