For those of you who don’t know what CSS is, this post might not be relevant Cascading Style Sheets form a markup language for HTML. It’s not coding, it’s not content, just the markup. It’s basically about positioning, colouring and typography.

Those who do use CSS all know by now that the <table> element shouldn’t be used to position your website anymore. It’s the quick and dirty way and in the end your website will come out all cracked up with unexplainable white spaces around. The horror!

But then we need to position in a different way. Absolute positioning is nice and easy, but not very flexible to more data or different browsers. (Internet Explorer is the Worst, as judged by W3C.) So relative positioning should be used. It’s fluid and flexible, but be careful, it’s difficult to get it all right in the end.

It turns out that Vadim Markeev from pepelsbey.net held a presentation at Russian Internet Technology Conference 2008 about so-called CSS frameworks. These frameworks help you set up a relative positioned website easily, by providing ready-made stylesheets.

Makeev makes remarks about a few of these frameworks, mentioning the pros and cons. The Choke Web Development Framework should be the best one around, according to Markeev. In the end (spoiler warning!) he concludes that the best frameworks are the ones made by you yourself.

Anyway, I like the Blueprint project. It’s very simple, integrates easily with Ruby on Rails and can save you much CSS frustration!