Why UI Frameworks?
06 Sep 2019Many people might have such a question: why do we need to use UI frameworks? I think the answer is simple: it helps us create better UI and saves time.
Learning a new framework like semantic UI indeed takes a lot of time. It’s not easy to understand all the terms. Semantic UI is a powerful tool with tremendous implements that helps build a website. However, the abundance of functionality also means the cost of time to learn.
It has been less than one week since I first time tried to learn semantic UI. I took half of my day watching the videos about semantic UI. After that, I decided to put my previous work into the new framework. The most significant difference is that I don’t need to use my own stylesheet as much. Semantic UI has most UI designs already built-in. The only thing I need to do is to set a correct class name for the element. One of the greatest things about semantic UI is that it has a library. I can check the class name and all the variations quickly.
Here is the website I created within 40 minutes. I think experienced web developers will take much less time with their familiar UI framework.
Semantic UI is so neat and flexible. The class names for the elements are the same as the English language. For example, if I want to insert a menu to my web page, I can write class="ui menu". If I don’t want the border between the items, I can change the class name to class="ui borderless menu". Even more, Semantic UI supports customized styles outside of the built-in UI designs. If I want to make my borderless menu have a light green background color, I can either put style="background-color: lightgreen;" in the headline of my menu, or change the settings in my CSS stylesheet.
Using UI frameworks is like making salads with the sauces. If I want to make a Caesar salad, with all the sauces from the UI frameworks, I don’t need to make mayonnaise again by myself. However, I can still make my salad unique by changing the ratio of ingredients and adding some special seasonings. UI frameworks give us an easy way to create our work, but the result is all upon us.