

Semantically speaking: Why CSS frameworks make sense - chriseppstein
http://blog.newint.org/tech/2009/04/08/semantically-speaking/

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_pius
_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."

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rimantas
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.

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

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Semiapies
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.)

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

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Semiapies
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".

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erlanger
_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.

~~~
Semiapies
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_...

~~~
erlanger
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.

~~~
Semiapies
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.

~~~
erlanger
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).

