Better UI for Yo(u) and Me(I)
18 Sep 2017
Recently, I’ve started learning how to write webpages with HTML and CSS, and even more recently, how to style and format those pages with a UI framework called Semantic UI. My immediate reaction was to be frustrated because not only was I unfamiliar with HTML and CSS, but I was also required to learn a new framework on top of that. Unfortunately, I also have very little interest in web design. I don’t really enjoy trying to make things pretty, and I don’t even really have any idea of what pretty is. It’s just not for me.
From such an introduction, one might think that I had a terrible time writing HTMl, CSS, and learning how to make dropdown menus and images line up with Semantic UI, and to be fair, I had my share of frustration from lack of understanding about how Semantic UI and HTML worked together. However, I definitely believe that a webpage made purely with HTML probably wouldn’t look as great as one made with a UI framework, and would most certainly require a lot more effort and time to complete. For these reasons, I actually ended up enjoying using and learning Semantic UI, and boy am I glad that someone else wrote something like this for me to use.
So what exactly are Semantic UI and UI Frameworks? Simply put, a UI Framework is a framework, or more specifically, an API, that allows developers to design and modify UIs quickly and efficiently. In the case of Semantic UI, there are a multitude of classes introduced, enough for the basic needs of any developer. Of course, learning this would take a while, don’t you think? Personally, I watched tutorial videos for about two hours, and even then I had only scratched the surface of the most basic parts of Semantic UI. One might think that using all of this time to learn a framework would be a bit much, maybe even unnecessary. but in my opinion, it’s definitely worth it. I can’t even begin to imagine how much effort it would take to write my latest assignment, which was an imitation of the site ManaSurge, (you can see the result here) in purely HTML. To put it shortly, yes, it’s a lot of effort to learn how to use a framework at first, but after overcoming the initial hurdle, using a framework will vastly improve the speed and efficiency at which you can code the same webpage. All in all, I’m extremely thankful that someone else did all that work so that I could just write single words for whole constructions of classes.