Why Are CSS Frameworks Important to AJAX Development

September 6th, 2007 Posted by Don Albrecht

Think of it as Visual Risk Management.
As AJAX developers, we regularly place control over swaths of the DOM in the hands of our users and outside of our web designers control. Sure, we can restrict the users capabilities, clean up word html, run things through validators, & provide all the styles needed, but these fixes require us to anticipate problems before they happen.

Using CSS frameworks, takes a lot of the risk out of the situation. A CSS framework removes the risk of a user accidentally calling on a structure that hasn’t been anticipated or that isn’t properly styled by our existing stylesheets. CSS frameworks take the guessing work out of the situation. By reseting and frequently standardizing all possible html elements. A CSS framework ensures that your markup behaves appropriately across browsers and user inputs. It doesn’t matter what framework you use either. In fact, a corporation’s professionally built CSS templates likely include all of the resets & standardizations needed.

If you don’t trust your stylesheets or are building one from scratch. I recommend you investigate the following frameworks.