[OpenLayers-Users] (slightly) OT: css frameworks

[Paul Spencer]

Hi,

this is somewhat off topic, but since we are usually in the business  
of putting maps into web pages, I usually find I have to put together  
some kind of web page around the map and that's where I start running  
into trouble.  While limiting myself to plain HTML tags and avoiding  
any kind of colour/style decisions is usually a wise idea, sometimes  
its nice to put some effort into the web page beyond the absolute  
minimum ...

For those of us that are, um, designed-challenged, using a CSS  
framework is a great place to start.  I've recently found a couple of  
them that might be of interest:

http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/

"Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS  
development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your  
project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and  
even a stylesheet for printing."

http://960.gs/

"The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development  
workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of  
960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be  
used separately or in tandem."

Both frameworks provide a fixed column grid based on a fixed width of  
960 pixels, and blueprint adds some decent choices for colors, styles  
etc.  The fixed width thing is often not what we want for mapping  
sites built with OpenLayers (we want the map to fill the page and  
these frameworks won't do that) but occasionally you need a different  
approach.

I put together a simple (non-mapping) page using blueprint after about  
5 mins of reading the tutorial and was pretty happy with the result.   
I haven't tried 960.gs yet but it seems similar in concept and  
probably more appropriate if you just want the layout part.

I haven't specifically researched other CSS frameworks so there's  
probably something better out there if you care to look.

Cheers

Paul
__________________________________________

    Paul Spencer
    Chief Technology Officer
    DM Solutions Group Inc
    http://www.dmsolutions.ca/