Baseline—A CSS Framework

I quite fancy the idea of frameworks to help speed up the daunting parts of web development. For some projects I have wished for an easy to use typography framework that gives good basic styles for basic paragraphs, lists, blockquotes, tables and forms. Baseline is a framework that seems to offer this.

What is it and what does it offer?

Baseline is quite an extensive framework, offering styles for most typography tags as well as forms and tables. As an addition it also offers a grid, which to me is not as useful given the extensive 960 grid system that I tend to lean towards using.

This is a quote from their website:

Built with typographic standards in mind, Baseline makes it easy to develop a website with a pleasing grid and good typography. Baseline starts with several files to reset the browser’s default behavior, build a basic typographic layout — including style for HTML forms and new HTML 5 elements — and build a simple grid system. Baseline was born to be a quick way to prototype a website and grew up to become a full typographic framework for the web using “real” baseline grid as its foundation.

Not All Things Golden Are Gold

I have one issue with the Baseline framework. While it offers some excellent styles, specifically the tables which I find excellent, I am not convinced that this framework is all that I want as a base. The reason is not so much the rarely used tags which are mainly good but rather the main headings and paragraph tags. It takes a while to recover from its reset code and the way the paragraphs are set up.

If you like an indent as a paragraph starter, this should fit you perfectly, if you don’t you will have to work around this to be less “old book style” and more modern.

Conclusion

For the right project I will try to use Baseline, at least a few parts of it such as the tables. In the short time I have had playing around with it so far, I am torn between impressed and finding it useful and finding it a pain to use.