As the owners of Clear Media UK Ltd, our web development company, my partner and I are constantly looking for ways to increase our productivity and improve the quality of our code. For a while we were creating vast single CSS documents for each website, and writing all sorts of CSS hacks to ensure our websites looked great in all web browsers, and this was ok, CSS was only just becoming commonplace and it was great to be able to separate the presentation for the content of a website. 

But after a while we started to wonder if there was any other ways we could speed up our CSS development, whilst improving our code and code maintainability. That got me started on Google, and I quickly came across a couple of CSS frameworks (Elements, YUI Grids and Blueprint). The idea struck me as great, I was already using PHP frameworks, so why not a CSS framework? So I started to look into these two frameworks. Whilst I liked the idea of Blueprint, and YUI I’m not a fan of the grids system, not many of our websites follow standard grid style layouts and they both throw the whole “semantic markup” thing out the window. So with that I mind I did rather like Elements, but for some reason I couldn’t get on with it, I actually don’t have anything bad to say about it at all, it just wasn’t for me. 

So together with my partner we sat down and came up with our own CSS framework - Cascade . The concept is simple, we didn’t want to tie people into a grids style system, or into using too many preset classes, so we kept it as lightweight as possible.

Essentially you have a comprehensive reset file, a presets file and good separation of css. For example all the main development is done in generic.css, any navigation css is put into navigation.css etc. There are some improvements to the reset.css, including a nice system for resetting IE 6 & 7 and that’s it! We’re using it on all our sites now and it has sped up development no-end. 

Please take a look at cascade and let me know what you think. ]]> http://leadingedgescripts.co.uk/web-development/cascade-another-css-framework/feed/ 2