"Spend your time innovating, not replicating."

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Blueprint offers:

• A CSS reset that eliminates the discrepancies across browsers.
• A solid grid that can support the most complex of layouts.
• Typography based on expert principles that predate the web.
• Form styles for great looking user interfaces.
• Print styles for making any webpage ready for paper.
• Plugins for buttons, tabs and sprites.
• Tools, editors, and templates for every step in your workflow.

Of course, Blueprint isn’t the only choice. It’s just the most popular, according to Google Trends:

keyword searches on Google

You may also be interested in 960 Grid System, or Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI).

It’s a Ruby on Rails project. You run a CLI utility that watches a directory where your .css and .sass reside. The changes you make to your .sass files get automatically parsed and translated to .css files. The .sass format allows you to have a simplified less repetitive stylesheet markup, in addition to the ability to use variables, functions, mathematic operations, and more.

• In CSS, ever wished you could store the color palette for your site design in a few variables and then just reference those variables through the stylesheet?
• Ever wished you could perform cross-browser compatible mathematical addition on layout column widths?
• Ever wished you could easily gather a library of commonly used CSS, and then selectively include them in your various designs with a single line?

Now you can, with Compass.

Installation on Debian/Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic is like:

sudo aptitude install ruby gem; # dependencies
sudo gem sources --add http://gems.github.com/
sudo gem install chriseppstein-compass; # install
sudo gem install chriseppstein-compass-960-plugin; #optional plugin
compass -f blueprint project; # example usage
compass -r ninesixty -f 960 project; # example plugin usage

Looks promising! See more detailed Compass install instructions.

UPDATE: Since I posted this, I realized that using the Ubuntu/debian package management system (Aptitude) to try to install Ruby and Rubygems is a huge hassle and ultimately will not work. Now I use RVM. Like so for Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit server:

# installing rvm
# see also: http://rohitarondekar.com/articles/installing-rails3-beta3-on-ubuntu-using-rvm
sudo aptitude install curl git-core
bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )
sed -i 's/^\[/# [/' ~/.bashrc
echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

# dependencies for compiling Ruby
sudo apt-get install curl bison build-essential autoconf zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libreadline6-dev
# dependencies for compiling my RubyGems gems
sudo aptitude install libpq-dev libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libxslt-dev libxml2-dev imagemagick

# openssl package for RVM
rvm package install openssl

# readline package for RVM
rvm package install readline

# installing ruby
rvm install 1.9.2 -C --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr,--with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr
sudo -i
echo "gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc" >> /etc/gemrc
rvm use 1.9.2 --default
sudo ln -s `which ruby` /usr/bin/ruby1.9.2

This will get you on edge Rails and Ruby. Then from there its as simple as:

gem install compass
compass watch

‘

And I no longer use 960gs. I prefer Susy now.

Hope this helps!