Are CSS Frameworks Really Worth Using?

Question

Is there anything that CSS Frameworks give that its not easy to make yourself?

Answer 1

The main use I have for CSS frameworks is that they tend to force you to think about how you're going to organise you code rather than provide you with indispensable tools for your day to day tasks.

For that reason, I'm a fan of boilerplate rather than things like blueprint as boilerplate tends to focus on how you structure your css stylesheets and imports rather than providing you with a collection of semantically confusing helper classes.

Answer 2

A reset stylesheet of some description is a worthwhile starting point.

For example:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

Answer 3

I think that all depends on your own knowledge and the project. If you have a lot of small business clients, or for other reasons makes a lot of similar designs, I think it saves some time to use css frameworks. And you save time for browser bugfixing, but you should always test anyways.

But if your CSS skills are good, you know the most common IE bugs and how to hack them, I dont see any need of using a framework in most cases.

Answer 4

IE6 compatibility.

Answer 5

Yes, testing testing and more testing. Do you have time to test and debug your code in all browsers? If you have it's the best to write your own code. If you need quick solution you can use some framework. I wrote one post about this subject: http://www.vcarrer.com/2008/08/when-to-use-css-framework.html