What’s special about UI frameworks? I have been thinking about this for a while. From the last week’s module, we learned how to build web pages by using HTML and CSS for the BrowserHistory WOD. There are lots of different functions and codes to help us build the web pages. The HTML is for us to put the content of the website, and the CSS is for us to style and design our webpage by changing the font and color etc. We can easily build any web pages that we want. But why do we need to learn UI frameworks? As stated, UI frameworks are not simple, and they can be almost as complicated to learn as a new programming language. Why can we just keep using raw HTML and CSS to build web pages? The answer is simple, UI frameworks just make our life easier and more convenient.
There are various frameworks within UI frameworks, such as Semantic UI and Twitter Bootstrap. For the IslandSnow WOD, we learned how to use Semantic UI to build the web pages. At first, it took me a bunch of time to figure out and understand how it works. The Semantic UI provided different structure and functions with documentation. For instance, it has the icon, grid, dropdown function. The code is simple and easy to understand. For each of those function, you can choose any design and outlook you want. For example, the “UI grid” structure can help you to align your space and makes content appear to flow more naturally on your page. There are many features that you can do with Semantic UI which can help you build your webpage.
Compare to raw HTML and CSS, the UI frameworks provide more structures and functions for us to choose to build a comprehensive and good looking website. I personally think the UI frameworks is a good tool for us to learn web designing. There are lots of formats out there that is easy to understand and feel comfortable to use. The Semantic UI includes the examples to show different theming. It is kind of cool and we can just write our own documentation based on it. Overall, this experience extends my knowledge and I become more familiar with using the Semantic UI.