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Thursday, August 12, 2010

Why Use a CSS Grid Framework?

Not all designers support the use of using grid frameworks over tables, or even at all. But let’s face it; there are layouts you simply can’t do with just HTML tables without a great deal of painful effort – and lots of nesting that’s hard to decipher, should ever have to make changes.
Sure, if you use grids, you’ll have to add some necessary HTML tag markup to your content, thus increasing page file sizes. Also, this means that markup and style are not truly separated – a tenet which many web designers would like to adhere to. (Some people feel, rightly or wrongly, that naysayers of CSS frameworks are designers who are worried that the need for their services will decline. Though, with this logic, coders are in trouble, too, especially with the increase in cross-browser code libraries such as jQuery.)
The fact is, using a CSS grid framework means that your browser loads the CSS file(s) only once and keeps them cached “on the client side”. Plus, the additional HTML markup needed to apply the “invisible” CSS framework is rarely so significant that bandwidth issues for readers should be a concern. (Interestingly, most of the naysayers seem to be talking about Yahoo UI Grids, not so much Blueprint.)
In most of the examples I’ve been working with, and in any of the magazine themes using grids that I’ve inspected, we’re talking relatively small file size increases – especially compared to the blog platform code being used. A single large image will likely take up more space. With faster Internet connections, it really isn’t such a big deal.
Design & Aesthetic Benefits
Regardless, of whether you use CSS grids for prototyping or production systems, there are multiple aesthetic and design benefits:
  1. Visual design cohesion between page elements.
  2. Uniformity and consistency in HTML element placement, thereby reducing CSS coding errors.
  3. Easier to apply the “rule of thirds” and the “golden section” to design, which results in a visually appealing layout to most human eyes.
  4. Mostly eliminates the need to use nested HTML tables.
  5. Nested sub-grids, for very complex designs that are relatively simple to produce.
  6. Easier to apply images and text callouts to produce asymmetric layouts for visual texture.
  7. Cross-browser support, so less screaming and hair pulling when you get around to testing for that bane of designers, IE. (Bill Gates must have felt so unloved as a child to have produced so much software that does what it wants, in defiance of standards that MSFT supposedly supports.)
  8. Reduced effort for producing slicker web page layouts, compared to coding the necessary CSS from scratch.
  9. Reduced future effort if you need to reposition elements or change rendering characteristics (typography, margins, etc.) for related elements en masse.
  10. Usable with static pages and CMSes/ blog platforms.
  11. Enables the popular use of creating “magazine” and premium themes for blog platforms. (WordPress seems to be the platform that CSS frameworks are most often used with, though any other platform that allows referencing a JavaScript source file should work just fine.)

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