UI Frameworks is software tools used for building software programs to run on the web enabling developers to build beautiful, responsive multi-device application without deep technical knowledge. But why bother with using a framework than just pure html? Well there comes some benefits but also cons when using certain UI Frameworks like Semantic UI. Starting off with the best point of Semantic UI is that it’s very easy to use. Like when you want three columns you would just type “three columns” and it’s done, it made three equal length columns for you to customize. Or maybe you want a dropdown menu so you can just type “dropdown” and it right there ready to use. Other pros also include less time to develop a page and the wide variety of themes available for it. Now let’s go on with the bad part UI Frameworks. Some UI Frameworks have missing options that maybe another UI Frameworks have but they also don’t have something like Semantic UI where it does not have the carousel option to make a slide show with arrows so you would instead have to use pure html to incorporate that into your development. It may be a minor thing but I feel that option is very useful for shopping sites where you would want to show off the products in a nice clean way instead of static pictures. Another problem is you’re not learning to code as most of the code is in the documentation of the UI Frameworks and the most you would have to do is just change the inside a little and maybe the styling and that’s it. But overall, there are different types of options to choose from for UI Frameworks and it all depends on what they prefer.
When starting off with Semantic UI as my first UI Frameworks, I was hoping it was going to be a really good option to use for me and it was said to take all the hard parts of using pure html but I felt a little let down. When recreating a website from the original, there were some options I could not do with what Semantic UI had given me like the carousel option to show off the products with captions or just text which made it very difficult to replicate it. Another problem that I faced when recreating that some parts were not like the original like the column positioning or where the text is located but that can be entirely due to the original site using something else compared to Semantic UI having it’s own style in a way. But that aside, once I got used to knowing what elements to use and teh characteristics, it made making the site much faster and most of the time it was just copy and paste from the documentation of Semantic UI and changing the style to match your liking and done compared to pure html where you would have to fiddle around with the little things just to make it perfect. I hope I can use other UI Frameworks to be able to compare one another and have a grasp on what’s truly for me because everyone going to have their preferences on what type of framework they like and don’t like.
After using Semantic UI and other forms of the UI like react, I would love to look at other UI frameworks as there were somethings that could not be achieved with only semantic UI and want to get a good foundation on how every UI framework works.