Christian Ziebarth

CSS Libraries

In Uncategorized on March 7, 2009 at 6:29 pm

I think at least 20% of the job of a web developer is keeping up with all the new developments out there in our realm. It seems like every day there is new CSS this, or new jQuery that. One of the CSS libraries is Blueprint and a few months ago I began to use it for a project but realized it was like my own unnamed (as yet) CSS/JavaScript framework that I’d been using so I scrapped that idea.

Blueprint CSS

A couple months later I found a job listing for a Blueprint developer and wrote to them and said, “I have my own thing that’s like Blueprint that works even a little better. Would that work for you?” The guy was nice but said, “Well, we would give preference to a Blueprint developer.” And that was the last I’ve heard from him.

When I started my next project (United States Mexican Restaurants; yes, I have three Mexican food-related websites, but only three) I decided I would put it in Blueprint so I could say I had Blueprint experience. So what is my opinion on Blueprint? It’s okay, but maybe not really better than the framework I had created on my own (but was not visionary enough to market). I think I will probably at least keep this one project in Blueprint. People have discussed drawbacks to Blueprint, the main complaint being, “What I find with a lot of these frameworks is that they try to be ‘all things to all people,’ which leads to using more code than is necessary.” But I can live with it on one of my sites.

Now I am finding out about Object Oriented CSS. Could this be what Blueprint should’ve been? Is Blueprint going to catch up to this? Personally, I’m going to have to investigate it more but it looks promising.

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