Posted by Argus on August 24, 2011 at 11:29am
I have been reading an interesting article about the future of grid systems, their advantages and flaws. The proposed system is supposed to be semantic (no more .grid-3), fluid and responsive.
It made me wonder if adapting the grid system Omega uses to semantic.gs would be benefitial.
This is not a feature request but just an open question. I cannot oversee all technical implications of it, but I do hope Omega will keep evolving to remain at the frontline of modern web-techniques.
i'm very curious about your idea's regarding this topic.
Comments
Very apropos
I was just reading this article about semantic classes at CSS-tricks: http://css-tricks.com/13423-semantic-class-names
The thing is, classes were never meant to be semantic in the way that HTML is semantic. The labels we use for class names are arbitrary in terms of the DOM or a document outline. Sure, they may mean something to the humans reading them, especially developers in a team who work on common code. But from the standpoint of a search crawler or data parsing, there is no formalization (given of course of the exception of formalized micro-formats). RDFa is a great example of a formalized semantic tokening system, but even this system, because it is extensible, is only semantic to the people who know how tokens map to meaning.
Any time we try to break out of a very tightly defined set of markup (HTML for example) we run into the classic semiotic problem: how does the signifier map to its definition?
semantic.gs, as I understand it, is an abstraction layer in LESS that more or less outputs the same type of floated grid system that 960.gs uses - different labels, same underlying mechanisms. There are only so many ways to grid a page using floats.
Now if semantic.gs is easier to grok and more accessible to end users like designers, then perhaps it's worth considering it as an improvement to the current frameworks that are admittedly complex.
I've found that Omega is already a great abstraction layer on top of 960.gs, though. In fact, one would really not even know what gridding framework underlies the theme - it just kinda works and that's good enough in most cases.
Sorry if this comes out of
Sorry if this comes out of nowhere, this thread is over a year old. I found it while looking for other efforts at building a base theme on top of the Semantic Grid System.
That is not the case. semantic.gs doesn't add anything to the markup; rather, it uses LESS during development to quickly build your grid layouts, and then you have those as your stylesheet. It is more like a calculator. It isn't dynamic, but combining some forward thinking and something like Delta, I think one could have a nice responsive and semantic grid, with hardly any cruft in the markup.
omega 4 is grid-framework
omega 4 is grid-framework agnostic but comes with a layout that is based on the susy grid. it does a good job allowing for semantic gridding based on SASS, Compass.
you might also want to have a look at Zen 5 or Aurora for base themes with semantic grids in Drupal