YAML Builder – Kickass CSS Site Building Tool

Posted by webchicklet in CSS on June 9th, 2008 | one response

I love CSS and I love creating new designs but I don’t love the starting process. Really, those first few steps of creating the structure of the CSS template just annoys me – and for lots and lots of people, it’s just plain hard to do. That’s why developers have been working on creating tools to generate CSS layout frameworks for the past few years, and some have been more successful than others. I hope to evaluate most of them, but today is focused on what I especially like – YAML Builder.

YAML Builder is described as a tool for visual development of CSS layouts, and the way it works is really sweet. By simply making a few choices from the options presented, you can quickly create multi-column layouts in various widths and with choices of navigation options. Below is a screenshot of what this looks like (image reduced in size to fit here):

The options tool sits on top of the generated layout, and as you make changes to the various options, the generated layout underneath immediately reflects the changes you made. It’s fast and easy, taking all of the stress, hard work, and tedium out of the CSS template building process. This enables you to immediately start playing with the fun parts of the design process…getting creative with colors and images. Oh, and in case you were wondering, it creates flexible, accessible code that works even with IE5 and up.

You can read more about YAML here (in English), but the tool itself is so intuitive that there’s really very little need for instructions. And that, for me, says a lot about why I love this tool so much.

Is it free? Well, maybe. YAML has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License (CC-A 2.0), which means that it permits both the non-commercial and the commercial use of the framework, for free, on the condition that a backlink to the project homepage remains in the layout. If, however, you wish to remove the backlink condition, you will need to pay for either a one-project license or a general multi-project license. You can read more about these license conditions here.

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