I've used and supported many CSS Frameworks. There are quite a
few out there that have huge fan bases and very active
participants.
Here are some of the more popular ones:
All of them have good and bad points in my opinion. I think for
a programmer who isn't familiar with CSS, a web shop that cranks
out sites and wants to insure consistancy between them or just
someone in a hurry, then they are a great idea. But for a serious
UI designer/developer i think they are overkill.
The typical structure of a CSS framework is:
- CSS reset - resetting every HTML tag (or using
Eric Meyer's reset) to basically zero out everything.
- Typography - Setting every HTML tag that you
just zeroed out to something specific.
- Grid - a series of classes that can be used to
create a newspaper-like structure for layout.
- Forms - defines classes or resets the basic
HTML form tags to have a specific look.
- Extras - Framework specific styles.
- Plugins - Themes, icons, fancy text ....
etc.
I'm a much bigger fan of the 1KB CSS Grid or the Malo framework. Honestly I just want to have some
reusable layout classes. I will adjust other things as needed
instead of doing everything upfront. I don't want to scan through
100's of CSS classes trying to figure out what is messing up my
design. I believe "Less is More".