Flavour of the month: Generic CSS frameworks for all!

It is amazing how the same idea seems to grip multiple developers at the same time. While the heydays of yet another image replacement technique seems to be over, flexible multicolumn CSS frameworks are the new sliced bread.

Thierry of TJK Design shows his One clean HTML markup, many layouts, Mike Stenhouse offers a CSS framework and Dirk Jesse brings Yet another multicolumn layout (in German).

If that is not enough, Alex Robinson gave me his impressive monster of an article + generator “one true layout” (to be released on P.I.E. soon) for review.

Update Stop the Press: The article is now live and can be read and enjoyed: In search of the One True Layout

A lot to read and skim through, and very great ideas, too. My concern is that it seems that everything generic tends to become a bit bloated and cryptic over time (DHTML libraries anyone?) and we’ll need to see how we can chop the ideas down into digestible chunks.

A lot of extra code has to be added to support outdated browsers, for example, and it would be cool to have these extras in an extra style sheet, for those who want to say “to hell with bad browsers” instead and keep their sheets clean and maintainable.

Sorry if that is already the case in some of those, I am also busy reviewing the AJAX/XML chapters for the upcoming JavaScript Reference for O’Reilly and prepare my webcast for the world usability day.

Read the linked bits now, you know it is good for you!