I suspect your analogy is better than you think – many people will find that a framework works just fine, and never take the step up to a proper bike.

By the time you’ve done all that, you probably would’ve been better starting your own from scratch.

Exactly my experience.

“True developers”. You people are funny… But dangerous !!

Paint by number ? May be. So what ? Spit on those people and their job ? Arrogant really !

Look, everybody can paint a house or cut grass… Piece of cake hey Bigyaz… Still, painters and gardeners jobs do exist right ? It is not because eveybody can do something that nobody will.

Anyway, the sadest really in this comment, and it’s follow up, is that you, Raena, the author of this article, do run straight into this troll !!!

From my experience, the creative people are about art and the ‘true developers’ are about data. To marry the two they need a minister, the front end web developer.

I’ll be happy when CSS is fixed and we get rid of the need for these intermediaries between the creative people and the true developers.

Same here, bigyaz. :)

I’ll be happy when CSS is fixed and we get rid of the need for these intermediaries between the creative people and the true developers.

Grid-based design is good design. The designs that look the most pleasing to the eye are based on grids. When they’re not based on grids, they look jumbled and chaotic.

Grid-based design does *not* have to be in column-priority order, and it does *not* dictate the load order. (Tables-based designs do, but we’re talking about grids, not tables.) Jason Santa Maria’s recent work on art direction for the web, and his modular layout system from 24Ways is a case in point.

As general rule, people talk of columns on the web, for two reasons: one, it’s easier and more accessible to scroll down than sideways (certainly far better than scrolling both directions, which, alas, I’ve seen) and two, the sites they’re referring to resemble printed media, which also goes in columns. The mere fact a column is on the right side doesn’t mean it loads last; check out Inman positioning, still the most reliable way to set up good-looking columns on the web. Columns can load in any order.

“The Three Layers” is a completely artificial construct that doesn’t fit reality, or do you really think that capitalization (a purely presentational attribute) belongs in CSS files and not in the HTML file? It’s fine as a general guideline, but should never be considered inviolable.

I can count the times I’ve changed the design of a site, and not touched the markup as well, on the toes of one hand (or the thumbs of one foot). Any good redesign will hit the html as well, since the html standards are always changing and you’ll want to update the markup as well.

Bloodofeve, try rolling up your own. Take a look at JSM’s or some of the others, and start whacking away at it. It’ll fit your hand better than any pre-fab tool out there, and once you start getting the hang of it, you’ll do fine.