960 Grid System
I stopped tinkering with Blueprint CSS in favor of The 960 Grid System.
I came across it a few weeks ago, and have really taken a liking to it. I don’t want my framework to have bloat issues dealing with plug-ins and things.
The 960 Grid System
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels.
Here are a few notes for my comparison (freshly downloaded files from developers site today):
Size:
Blueprint 0.7.1.zip = 3.61MB
960_download.zip = 180KB
Blueprint 0.7.1.zip contains 45 files and 9 folders, at an uncompressed size of 6.44MB.
960_download.zip contains 19 files and 11 folders, at an uncompressed size of 1.36MB.
Blueprint 0.7.1.zip contains 10 *.css files (one each of forms.css, grid.css, reset.css & typography.css. two each of ie.css, print.css, & screen.css)
960_download.zip contains 6 *.css files (two each of 960.css, reset.css, & text.css).
Adding to the Blueprint 0.7.1.zip bloat is a ‘CSS Validator Binary Distribution’, as well as some Ruby server-side scripts.
The 960 Grid System includes some graphic files and a PDF document for assisting in the grid layout process.
While both frameworks use the similarly named ID for ‘container’, 960 goes one step further to differentiate ‘container_12’ or ‘container_16’. I feel this gives me greater control in my layout choices while coding my pages.
I’ll go into further detail as I tinker with 960 some more this week.