Placing 960 Grid System values in an external file

Question

I'm thinking of using Nathan Smith's 960 Grid System for layout in the ASP.NET MVC site that I'm writing.

I've noticed that all examples of 960.gs usage show HTML that looks like this:

<div class="container_12"> 
    <div class="grid_12"> 
    </div> 
    <!-- end .grid_12 --> 
    <div class="clear"></div> 
    <div class="grid_1"> 
    </div>
    <!-- ... -->
</div>

I don't particularly like putting all those grid values inside the HTML itself - it creates clutter and with a lot of content, that can become hard to manage.

Is it possible to somehow put those container and grid values inside an external file that applies grid values based on the id or class attributes of certain tags?

Answer 1

You can't externalize those values. While it would be possible to merge the names into the file such that the names that you designate to the divs are multiple CSS selectors with the grid (i.e.: .sidebar, .grid_3 {...}), this is impractical and makes it nearly impossible to manage and maintain the code. The readability and maintainability that you'd be sacrificing is much more valuable than the semantic goodness that you'd be gaining.

The 960 grid system is pretty ugly on the back end. What you give up in niceness, you gain in simplicity and efficiency of development. Perhaps a different column-based gird system would be better. Consider something like Frame: http://frame.serverboy.net/ (</shameless_plug>) or Blueprint CSS.

Hope this helps.