Anyone used CSS blueprint with Sharepoint sites

Question

Anyone used the blueprint (http://www.blueprintcss.org/) with Office Sharepoint server publishing sites? If yes, what do you think? Any catches or problems ? does it really save time and make it easy to make the site working fine cross browsers?

Answer 1

I used Blueprint CSS with SharePoint (MOSS) on a project last year.

I'm a UK-based contractor and this was for a 3 month project with 1 technical resource (me). The company involved (large UK company providing services to the banking industry) had an existing intranet installation and wanted to move to a MOSS publishing site based intranet.

The design was column based with a fixed width (960px) so I took a look at the CSS frameworks available at the time and Blueprint looked simple and flexible (design tool at http://kematzy.com/blueprint-generator/ to build a custom grid).

Blueprint itself worked well, and the problems I encountered using it would be pretty much the same as any MOSS project that involves large customisations to the master page / page layouts. I did end up writing my own reset CSS rather than use the default one as I didn't want to completely clobber the MOSS styles. Gotchas:

• SharePoint uses quirks mode (the html doesn't define a doctype) so adding a doctype means plenty of fiddling with the shipped CSS styles to get it all working.
• The control rendering is the normal asp.net mess of nested tables etc., which combined with the quirks mode meant that getting things to stay in the grid was always somewhat tricky.
• I only had to support IE (6 & 7) as it was an internal intranet, and even the inconsistencies in their rendering caused a few problems. Short of using control adapters to try and generate sane html, I think this would only get worse supporting other browsers as well.

Having said all that, it worked well with the master pages and was great with page layouts (different columns/layouts and having a 'magazine style' front page). And we got the project done with time to spare so yes, I'd use it again and recommend it - as long as you're happy to be knee-deep in CSS quite quickly..

Answer 2

Being an accessibility evangelist I also went down the same path of using Blueprint in an effort to make things more standards-compliant. TO be honest I would not do it again.

Trying to beat MOSS 2007 into submission and make it accessible is a lost cause. Even great projects like the AKS (Accessibility Kit for SharePoint) do little more than add a summary paramater to the swarm of nested tables rendered by woefully out-dated .NET controls.

Short of rewriting all these controls there's just no point. SharePoint publishing sites that don't use too many of these might be slightly easier to manage. But IMO you'd be better of waiting for 2010 which does a much better job of this.

If meeting WCAG is important now then you're far better off going with another CMS that does this out-of-the-box, or at least let's you do it without too much pain.