Can you recommend a CSS Framework (or UI Framework) for enterprise web apps?

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.


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.


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.