Better than Nothing

07 Oct 2021

Needlessly Drowning

If you were on a leaking ship and bailing water with your hands and someone throws you a plastic cup. You would gladly take it since it does help. However a plastic cup is most likely not be your first choice. This is how I feel about working with HTML and UI frameworks. One is slightly better than the other but I would rather not use it at all (give me a pump). I am not making any websites to stand out but just convey information. For this there are multiple tools; WIX, squarespace, zyro, ukit the list goes on. All of these provide a graphical interface for placing elements, changing fonts, and previewing the site.

I’ve used WordPress to manage some websites and its very easy to grab a template and start editing it. You could do the same thing in pure HTML but previewing the changes takes much more time and its more prone to errors. Working with raw HTML does have the advantage of being more precise but most of these site building tools give you the option to edit the HTML directly if you want to tweak specific elements.

UI frameworks are steps above raw HTML in terms of ease of use but there are easier ways to get similar results. It is a good tool to have but personally I wouldn’t bother. Below are two sites that use wordpress both look good.

https://www.rollingstone.com/ RStone Page https://www.daybreaker.com/ DBreaker Page

I honestly haven’t worked enough with building web pages to have an informed opinion on UI frameworks I have only used one (semantic UI). I also started making pages with a graphical interface which probably leads to some bias. Right now I just don’t see why you would make things this way. I suppose its similar to the people who want to do everything in a command line, but I have the same reaction to them “why?”.

What Is A UI Framework?

I wrote the above section and thought “I don’t really know what a UI Framework is”. Looking it up didn’t really provide any clarity the definition seems very loose.

Below is what my professor defines it as:

A (web) UI framework provides a set of CSS classes and/or Javascript functions that:

Using this definition I would think wordpress and any of the site building resources I mentioned would qualify as UI Frameworks. These are immensely different experiences when comparing them to semantic UI. As such I find it odd to group these tools together and think that the current definition of “UI framework” is not defined well. If I narrow it down specifically to UI frameworks like Semantic UI I stand by my above statement. Its better than raw HTML but there are better options. Using the broad definition UI frameworks are great so much better than raw HTML and very easy to use. Regardless of the semantics UI frameworks just makes things easier it’s what loosely defines them. You should use them.