Can someone recommend a bells and whistles CSS framework? [closed]

Question

I am looking for a bells and whistles CSS framework. I have found a number online that deal with "grids", and some that deal with "typography" and others that deal with "resetting".

What I have not found is something that will give my web applications a consistent reusable style or theme.

I guess it would have to have a number of predefined elements that do things, for example:

div.boxed {...}

And then a number of themes or plugins that provide these in a consistent way. Javascript toolkits like ExtJS, YUI, and also GWT have their own skinability, and I guess this is the featureset that I want, but independent of any Javascript library.

(Open source would be best, but we don't mind paying)

Edit: 5 good answers, but I have seen all those frameworks, and they are not enough of what I am looking for. Perhaps what I am looking for doesn't exist. Or I haven't explained properly. I will give them a good going over and see.

Forceps

Answer 1

Compass really changes things for you.

In addition to providing everything from grids to mixins like horizontal-list, it's built on top of SASS so you get stuff like reuse and variables and other such things.

It makes things you don't even realize are painful pain-free. Definitely worth looking over.

Outboard

This looks really interesting. But I am not using ruby. Is that a requirement? – Forceps

You only need ruby to compile your CSS. Your deployment can be static files. I work with the author -- everyone who touches this (designer to engineer) is just amazed at what they can suddenly do. – Outboard

Ok, Compass is amazingly cool. If I could vote this twice I would. – Forceps

Compass is revolutionary. It is the Rails of CSS. – Famine

Answer 2

I am a fan of Blue Print CSS, their reset and grids styles are a very good starting point. Especially if you care about having clean html and css.

Floridafloridia

Blueprint CSS is certainly a bells and whistles framework. – Rento

Answer 3

960gs is good for layouts.

Ironstone

Yea, I've been using some of this framework for a while. – Rento

Answer 4

Just use YUI Grids, it's as good as it gets :P

Ormolu

YUI grids only handles Grids, I have used it and like it, but I am looking for something more than that. – Forceps

"More than YUI"? Good luck with that :p – Cathrine

YUI js is quite complete, but apart from rest-fonts-grids I see no reusable CSS components in YUI. Is there some way of leveraging yui-skin-sam or some such? – Forceps

Answer 5

One of the long term plans for compass is to create tools for designers to share designs for things like shiny buttons or even whole pages. It's actually possible right now but the mechanims are not well documented yet. But I'm glad you like it, please feel free to bug us on the mailing list.

Hartz

Answer 6

I'm a huge fan of BlueTrip which bills itself as, "A full featured and beautiful CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) framework which combined the best of Blueprint, Tripoli (hence the name), Hartija's print stylesheet, 960.gs's simplicity, and Elements' icons, and has now found a life of its own."

Pentavalent

Answer 7

I second YAML. It's highly versatile, well-documented, has a builder tool etc. The forms component does some annoying hover effects which I always disable but otherwise YAML gives you a good basis to build your own framework, possibly with the help of LESS, a tool that you'll soon find indispensable.

Kef

Answer 8

I found YAML (Yet Another Multi-columned Layout) to be an excellent, comprehensive, highly adaptable all-rounder.

Utimer

Answer 9

Emastic lightweight, em based, fluid and fixed columns.

Nebiim

Answer 10

There is also LESS - LEaner cSS.

Provides the following features:

• Mixins
• Variables
• Nested selectors
• Operations

Wyndham