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content into grids. They are also wonderful tools to pick apart to voraciously learn how
they work.
Who knows, after playing around with CSS frameworks for a bit and learning how they
operate, you might end up developing a real passion for the style sheet language and
end up writing your own CSS faster by hand than you would implement an already made
solution!
In the following, we've highlighted three frameworks, starting with the simplest, which
takes care of many of the desktop/mobile CSS headaches for you—the 1140px Grid .
Second is Less Framework 4 , which provides some support but has more room for
modification. Finally, we discuss 320 and Up , a version of Less Framework 4 that allows
you to quickly get up and running without a massive amount of tweaking!
1140px Grid
The 1140px Grid is another CSS framework currently running around on the Internet with
a pretty big following. The framework itself is released under the Creative Commons
license and is free to use, copy, distribute, and manipulate to your heart's content.
This framework was created to accommodate recent changes in screen resolution,
specifically the current prominence of 1280 x 800 computer screens, while also scaling
fluidly for smaller displays. Up until very recently, most sites were designed around the
idea that the common user's browser would have a resolution of around 1024 pixels in
width and 800 pixels in height. However, over the course of the past few years, a lot of
developers have noticed that ever so slowly the average user screen resolution has been
shifting higher.
Keeping this in mind, 1140px Grid was designed to take advantage of that now more
common screen resolution and to scale down from there in a fluid manner using
responsive web design, as discussed in Chapter 5 of this topic. What that means for you
as a developer is that if you were designing and building a web application for a desktop
user experience, you would only have to design the application once for a larger
monitor. The framework then intelligently scales the application down for you for any
browsers with a lower resolution.
However, this isn't always a set-it-and-forget-it process and sometimes it does require
you to get in there and muck around with the CSS a bit, to get it looking exactly how you
want it to look. For example, the grid will allow you to use a number of columns;
however, if you intend for your application to be both appealing on the desktop and on a
small browser (similar to what we discussed earlier in the topic, when discussing
dedicated mobile versions as opposed to one page to serve both), you may wish to limit
yourself to one grid. All in all, though, if you have to build big before you build small, you
can make your life a little easier by checking out 1140px Grid framework at
http://cssgrid.net/
 
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