: Can you recommend a CSS Framework (or UI Framework) for enterprise web apps? Is there a CSS Framework that tries to provide for business applications, specifically? I've looked at the Mocha UI

@Turnbaugh106

Bootstrap from Twitter is amazing.

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@Margaret670

As a free and language agnostic framework, there is always the use of the Compass framework that works very well in conjunction with the Sass language, which will make your CSS a lot more themable and reusable.

If you are using Linux, it is easily installable via rubygems (note that you don't need to know anything about ruby, I write PHP and use Sass -- now known as Scss for Sass3) though it might be easy to get on any other platform too, but I haven't checked.

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@Ogunnowo487

I am surprised, no one suggested blueprint till now. Well! this is just a CSS framework which can down your designing effort.



[Oct 2013]

Now a days Foundation and Bootstarp frameworks are idle for web development. They let you design responsive web pages.

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@Karen161

I agree with previous (Chris Lively and Lèse majestè) answers. And also I found the link you provide very cool.

But let's go to my answer. I think you should make it in your own way. There are many resources you can use. I will cite mine.

While I was developing my own framework and generators, the need to have a UI framework become evident, hence all classes and ids on HTML templates were being generated automatically.

Then after studying commom patterns I used, I've made my own CSS UI Utility (as well as some JS utilities). The key point in my approach is using many different classes.

.required, .relaxed, .warning, .error, .success, .roundedBox, .gradient, .white70 [rgba(255,255,255,0.7)], .black30, .padded, are some examples.

on the HTML side:

Also, it is implemented over 960 grid, and has many other utilities, like @font -face kits. In fact, this leads me with just a few work. Adding correct classes, and perhaps making some minor adjustments for each project.

Along with multiple classes, the other core point is to ensure everything keep binded to a black-white-gray schema, working with opacities. This is for reduce code changes needed for each project, hence each project usually has its own color schema.

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@Courtney195

The problem is that "finished" means different things to different people.

Maybe you want a nice little border to fade in around your input elements after they have received focus. Maybe you want all of your paragraph elements to have a 4 pixel margin. Or maybe you want to ensure that all buttons have blue text with a gloss feel.

You see, there is no single solution. It's all a matter of design and taste which is by no means the same for everyone AND continues to evolve. Web 2.0 brought us larger fonts, bigger boxes to type in, and a lack of nested drop down menus (thankfully). Who knows what the UI geeks will figure out for "3.0"... Whatever it is, it will hopefully be as radically different as the 2.0 stuff was from the sites from the 90's.

Certain technologies like WPF, Flash, and Silverlight exist, in part, to give a completely different feel to a site. But, again, these are simply starting points to allow your own creativity to flourish. jQuery UI and Mocha UI fall into the same categories.

Now, depending on the backend tech you are using there are control vendors (like telerik and DevExpress) who provide skins out of the box for their control libraries and they are a great way to slap something together that actually looks pretty good.

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@Ogunnowo487

Mocha UI and jQuery UI are JavaScript UI libraries, which have very a different purpose from what a CSS framework aims to do. I don't think you'll find a CSS framework that can do what those libraries do.

Firstly, UI is more than just aesthetics or visual design; it includes a defined set of behaviors and interactions. That's why JavaScript is necessary to create a UI library like Mocha UI or YUI. CSS just isn't capable of generating rich UI widgets on its own. That's why non-AJAX apps just don't have very rich UIs.

The other thing is, even if you're only interested in a pre-packaged set of UI graphics, the aesthetics of a UI has to match the web design it's placed in. So aside from rapid prototyping, there wouldn't be much use for a prepackaged UI "theme". That's why most JavaScript UI libraries let you customize the look and feel of the UI components they come with. And that involves editing images in addition to the CSS styles.

For these reasons, most CSS frameworks are frameworks for writing CSS, not UI frameworks that you can just drop into an application to make it look good. Such frameworks can certainly make writing CSS for large applications more manageable, but in the end you still need a UI designer and a front-end programmer to design and implement the UI.

Now, if you're using a popular CMS you could download or purchase a theme for it. But I know of no CSS theming/skinning framework that can be used in a custom application. Besides, most enterprise web applications have custom-designed UIs not pre-built themes.

That said, what you could do is do what many UX designers and interaction designers do. That is, build a company-wide custom UI library (or have one created for you) that all of your applications will use. This will ensure that all of your applications have a uniform "signature" look that is aligned with your brand. And it saves your front-end developers the time of having to rewrite UI styles for each app.

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