Video: CSS Frameworks – Make the Right Choice

In the past couple of months, I have had the great pleasure of presenting a talk entitled “CSS Frameworks: Make the Right Choice” at both of Australia’s premier web design conferences: Web Directions South 2009 and Edge of the Web 2009.

Of course, even the most dedicated SitePoint fan could find it hard to justify a trip to Australia to see me speak; thankfully, the folks at Web Directions were kind enough to share the audio recorded at the event under a Creative Commons license that enables me to share it with you in a richer format.

I am delighted, therefore, to present this video re-creation of the talk including my animated slides, a screencast video demo, and the audio recorded live at Web Directions South 2009. Be sure to visit the Web Directions site for the accumulated audio and slides from the entire conference series!

CSS Frameworks: Make the Right Choice (WDS09) from SitePoint Staff on Vimeo.

SitePoint CTO Kevin Yank presented this talk at Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney, Australia on Friday, October 9th, 2009.

With the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were born. In this session, we will survey the landscape of CSS frameworks and consider how each of them deals with the unique challenge of creating generalised, reusable CSS styles.

There are a number of different approaches, and some are better than others. Choose the right framework and you’ll save yourself a lot of work. Choose the wrong one, and you’ll find your projects weighed down by restrictive assumptions and masses of code that you don’t understand. When it comes to CSS frameworks, making the right choice is everything. By the end of this session, you might just decide that the right framework for you is no framework at all.