@Ryan

I don’t know your professional situation, but in my experience, 90% of designers end up with their own set of tags that they use on a regular basis. Whether or not they are semantic may be up for debate, but in my mind, a design firm needs a common system that is consistent, understandable, and helpful, or else each designer will do their own thing and coordination will slow things down. If a non-semantic class name is the only price we have to pay for that, then I say bring it on. It’s just a class. Let the ID’s describe the content. If you feel that they’re inefficient, then that’s another issue altogether (although millions of designers using Blueprint, YUI, 960.gs, and Tripoli would disagree).

-Mike, Capsize Designs

Mike, I am a professional web developer building sites every day. I use my own framework that blends speedy development with the knowledge one should have as a professional in the field.

The aim of my personal framework (which team members also use) is to cut down on repeat work and kick start development. When it comes the main meat of styling the content we deal with that case by case. Presentation is handled in the CSS and with meaningful identifiers and classes, not through presentational classes such as those used in bluetrip (span-1, span-12, prefix-1 etc). There are many advantages to taking this route, one being that once the content and structure has been defined you are *almost* entirely working within the CSS, no need to go back and change classes, ids or structure in the HTML (as you often have to with blueprint, yui etc). This is the whole point in separating content from presentation.

Of course I encourage researching these frameworks to learn more and to use them in rapid protoyping. I also recommend developing a custom framework but as I’ve stated I do not consider cookie cutter frameworks suitable for real world professional situations.

@Mike&Ryan,

Guys, that was an interesting exchange. Obviously you’re both coming at it from a designers point of view and I respect your opinions. From my point of view, as a developer, I like what these frameworks can bring to the game without me having to have such an indepth understanding of CSS.

I’ve only just been in the position to employ a designer to help me out with our projects, so previously these kind of frameworks were a real boon!

@Chris
By that reasoning, no one should be using jQuery, CodeIgniter, Rails, Dojo, CakePHP, Groovy, ExtJS, or any other framework. Perhaps we should also abandon all CMS and blogging platforms because they allow us to get the job done without coding it from scratch. We are web designers. We do it for money. It’s a job. If something can make the job get done more quickly, then I’m all for it. Sticking to raw CSS just because you think there’s some pride in doing that is like coding everything in binary in the face of object oriented languages.

I never said that BlueTrip is in any way a replacement for knowing CSS. You’re still not going to be able to make a decent site if you don’t know CSS, even with BlueTrip. BUT BlueTrip is a tool to make your site creation go faster because it takes out the grunt work and lets you get to the site specific stuff.

Oh I know . I was trying to back up your point with one of my own, but looks like I was arguing with you. Sorry about that!

just wondering, if blueprints only downfall is that the class names aren’t semantic, couldn’t the class names just be renamed once the page has been built?