In a recent podcast of boagworld, I heard a brief mention of CSS Frameworks. Creating reusable CSS has been on my to-do list for about a year now, but ‘the list’ of to-do’s keeps growing and somehow this never got to the top of the list. Luckily, I found that Mike Stenhouse already published an article on his CSS Framework back in April of 2005. I’ve briefly started one project using Mike’s framework and it seems to work well, besides a difference of naming conventions for page areas.

The idea is pretty simple. Those of us who write CSS  on regular occasion tend to form patterns in markup, CSS styles and naming conventions. Additionally, there are a few standard layouts that we see repeated all over the web. Some patterns are more obvious than others. There’s the left vertical navigation, top horizontal navigation and 1-3 column layouts to name a few. By using a framework, either yours or one by someone like Mike, you should be able to fine tune the CSS to fix browser bugs, change the layout easily and rapidly deploy cross-browser HTML/CSS.