NOTE: Due to the overwhelming popularity of BlueTrip, I’ve created a dedicated site for it at bluetrip.org. It’s a work in progress, but should help clear up some of the issues that come with running BlueTrip out of this blog post.

CSS Frameworks have been a hot topic the past few months. Although they’ve been getting a lot of heat from semantic freaks and minimalists (for adding unnecessary code), I think they’re a step forward. As I’ve said before, web design is about doing things quickly and beautifully. No matter how you feel about frameworks, it’s undeniable that they speed up the design process. I’m a fan.

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I’ve become a little obsessed with CSS frameworks lately. I’ve tried just about all of them at one point or another. I’ve argued with many a semantic warrior who hates them for their non-descriptive clss names. I’ve fought with a few minimalists who can’t stand all of the (4kb…seriously) bloated code.

Regardless of how you feel about them, it’s pretty obvious that they save time, and that’s what we’re all after. Here’s my take on a few of them:

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Javascript libraries are relatively new, but they’re already everywhere. Almost every major website has some type of library in use (Facebook - Scriptaculous, Amazon - jQuery, Apple - Scriptaculous, Google - jQuery, Digg - jQuery, blah blah blah). With the way that this trend is going, some ground rules need to be laid.

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jQuery is basically amazing. It’s no-brainer syntax makes it incredibly easy to learn, and it’s chaining cuts tons of would-be Javascript into one or two lines. As an example of this, let me show how you stupidly easy it is to make a really slick, totally useful Ajax contact form using jQuery.

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