Fight Div-itis and Class-itis With the 960 Grid System

Years ago, HTML tables were the standard for laying out web pages. CSS and semantic thinking changed that, and today CSS frameworks make designing relatively easy.

But they can also generate a surprising number of superfluous elements. The 960 Grid System encourages the addition of div elements and class attributes, especially on complicated pages. Is this really an improvement over nested tables? Creating cleaner code means going beyond the framework and thinking about what it really represents.

Read the full article I wrote at Webdesigner Depot.

Above: Taking the 960 Grid System at face value requires a div for each block, plus at least one container. Those divs add up quickly when layouts get complicated.