Archives for 2009

CSScaffold is a new type of CSS, built with PHP, that changes the way you write and manage your CSS. It speeds up your development time by doing the hard work for you. Scaffold is different to other CSS frameworks, like Blueprint and 960.gs, but it’s power lies in it’s ability to extend the CSS language. It offers you the possibility to generate the CSS found in other CSS frameworks dynamically, like grid classes to quickly build layouts. The framework uses .htaccess files to automatically pass any CSS file through Scaffold first for processing and caching. You just have to drop the files onto your server (keep the framework in your CSS directory) and you’re ready to go with the CSS you’ve already written.

Features include:

• Written like CSS (it is not necessary to learn a new language to use it)
• Usage of constants within the CSS document
• Use mixins like in SASS and Compass
• Nest selectors to tidy up your code
• Optimize, compress and gzip
• Generate test suites for typography, layouts and form styles
• Plugin architecture that lets you extend the language the way you want

xCSS is an open source lightweight framework that bases on CSS to empower a straight forward and object-oriented workflow when developing complex styles cascades. This framework is very useful to cut out development time by: having an intuitive overview of the overall CSS structure, using variables, re-using style existing cascades, nesting selector declarations, extending objects and many other handy features. xCSS seemly integrated into any existing workflow. An advantage is that the CSS overhead is getting reduced while your (X)HTML attributes remain semantic.

xCSS compiles on the fly (your natural CSS workflow remains the same) and it easily configurable (you can setup the file hierarchy and miscellaneous output settings in one single xCSS config file).