Again from Jeremy’s great live blogging of An Event Apart San Francisco, here’s Eric on CSS frameworks. I’m glad to see someone else broaching this topic, and in general it looks like Eric did a great job of rounding ‘em up. A few bits and responses:
If you’re going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that you’ve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.
Generally speaking, I agree. I have made great use of Blueprint — but it’s worth nothing that almost all of the basic concepts were created by me (along with Nathan and Christian). As Blueprint has progressed, it’s gotten farther and farther away from what we created, and I’ve been less enthralled by it. The point is: something you created yourself is always going to be more useful to you than something you didn’t.
Four of them use psuedo-namespaced class names beginning with grid- or container- or span- (which you would apply to a div!?).
I’m not sure if the parenthetical is Jeremy or Eric speaking, but this is also worth noting: in the original CSS framework Nathan, Christian, and I created, you were not necessarily supposed to apply those classes to a div. The classes were for any element, and there was no encouragement to liter your markup with extraneous div elements. The original Blueprint retained this philosophy, but later changed it, asking people to always use div elements as columns. I find this to be incredibly wrong, and I always override this Blueprint functionality when I use the framework. If you are going to use a div for every layout column/row/unit/whatever, you may as well just use tables. I hope everyone knows and understands that when I was touting Blueprint, it was before the made the boneheaded decision to require the use of a div element for every column. Visit site »
Alex smashes all the silly arguments CSS spec editor Bert Bos tried to use against the concept of CSS “variables” (really constants). I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks CSS variables are a bad idea just isn’t living in the real world of web development these days. Go Alex! Visit site »
Bert is, of course, referring to symbolic constants, which many people seem to want to call “variables,” even though they’re really not. Anyway, he contends that the idea of constants in CSS is flawed, in large part because added complexity makes CSS more difficult to learn. I think this is kind of absurd. CSS is easy to learn. Really easy, in fact (I’ve said for years that the only hard part of HTML and CSS is browser bugs. Take browser bugs out of the equation, and CSS is child’s play). If symbolic constants are really so complicated that non-programers can’t grasp them (which they’re not), then they simply don’t have to use them.
But even more importantly than that: why is keeping CSS easy to learn so damned important? The only people that need to know CSS are web developers. This notion of keeping it simple so “regular people” can read and understand it is silly. Doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists don’t keep their specs and documentation simple so regular people can understand it, because regular people don’t need to understand it. Why does the W3 seem to place such an emphasis on making CSS palatable to everyone? Visit site »
Kenny suggests that “developing with web standards is now a standard,” and that we all need to stop focusing on getting people to write standards-compliant code and start focusing on getting the browser makers to give us the new shiny and the W3C to finish some of it’s long-proposed specs. I agree completely. Visit site »
Suddenly it seems like respected web designers everywhere are starting to catch on to what I’ve been saying for a couple years now: established standards and best practices are great, but they are simply a means to an end, and we should always challenge them in cases where it seems like a different means to the same end might be more effective. “Perfect” can be, at times, the enemy of “good”.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything in Martin’s article, but I’m glad to see other big names beginning to jump on the pragmatic, but still standards-oriented, approach. Visit site »
nGen Works is unquestionably one of the best bunch of guys I’ve met in this industry, and they’re looking for a great production person to join their team. If you’re a great HTML/CSS/JS person, you definitely want to check out this job. nGen is based in Jacksonville, FL, but the job description says, “relocation optional.” Visit site »
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
Oh man, this looks sweet. I’ll say it again: the WebKit team is totally doing the right thing here by continuing to innovate with these new features. Dear WebKit: web designers everywhere thank you! Visit site »
EveryBlock takes over A List Apart for an issue, with Wilson Miner’s awesome piece on using web standards to create data visualizations like bar charts and sparklines, and Paul Smith showing you how to roll your own custom mapping interface. Great issue. Visit site »
I’m not entirely convinced that Django’s recent popularity has much to do with web standards, nor am I that convinced that Django is “winning” in our community over Rails or other modern frameworks — but, it’s true that Django allows those of us who value web standards to do our thing quite easily, and it’s good to hear that people are noticing that. Visit site »
May 22nd, 2008–May 23rd, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.”
So there you have it. This should make a lot of standards-oriented developers happy, as it makes out jobs easier. I think this is the right move by Microsoft, although I never could quite figure out very firmly where I stood on the whole topic. At the very least, it prove MS is listening to the developers, and that can only be a good thing. Visit site »
For anyone trying to make sense out of the whole IE8 X-UA-Compatible nonsense, James Bennet's explanation is almost certainly the most well-thought out and easy-to-understand one you're going to find. I now have an opinion on this matter. I'm with James: X-No-Thanks.
But even though I have an opinion, it’s not a very strong one. Why? Because, quite frankly, I’m just not that interested. If X-UA-Compatible lands in IE8, I'll suck it up and spend 20 minutes putting the tag in all my sites, toss a few more curse words Microsoft's way, and move the fuck on. Ultimately, for those of us doing standards-based work, this isn't that big a deal. If we're doing things right, and this actually happens, it means we have to put one measly meta tag in our code form now on. Big f’ing deal.
Here’s hoping it doesn’t ever happen, though. Visit site »
Building on his post at Wired’s blog earlier this week, Scott Gilbertson now has a full article on the Wired front page, and again quotes me. I know it seems silly, but this is really cool to me. I’ve been reading Wired since its inception in the early 90s, so to be quoted on their website is pretty neat. And, they didn’t even get me using an F-bomb, this time. :) Visit site »
Wow, very nice. This is impressive. It also makes Opera look very, very silly. So now that all the majors can claim reasonable standard compliancy, can we please get those browser wars started again? :)
Congrats, IE8 team! Visit site »
A life long goal of mine is to be mentioned in Wired magazine. Today, I’m in their blog. That’s pretty close, right? It even calls me a “prominent developer.” But most importantly, it quotes me (accurately, even!), dropping an F-bomb. Classy, Jeff. Real classy.
Thanks, Wired. :) Visit site »
Stuart responded to the same Alex Russell piece I did, only less positively. Stuart makes good counter-arguments to many of Alex’s points. Alex then shows up in the comments and the two politely debate back and forth — it’s a really great discussion. The conclusion? Stuart seems to be coming around to many of Alex’s ideas.
It’s tough to talk openly in this community about things that aren’t “compliant.” The second you mention trying something outside of the standards world, you get clubbed with the giant Internet stick, even if you’re a standards advocate 95% of the time. I’m glad people are starting to talk openly about what’s *really important — innovation and moving forward — rather than just about how we can all fall in line and be compliant all the damn time. Visit site »