The Venture into Web Development
10 Oct 2019My Rookie Experience
My introduction to HTML and CSS was on Free Code Camp. I was attempting to learn about web development on my own time, outside of school. The first few exercises involved using HTML to create a page about cats, and I remembered feeling underwhelmed. There was so many different types of elements and attributes for those different elements just to create a one page cat website with a picture and some words. The page seemed so simple for the time and code it took to create. I thought how do people create such professional and stylish websites using these languages?
HTML vs Semantic UI
My first project using Semantic UI was a remake of another project, Browser History. The original Browser History project was made using raw HTML and CSS and looked like this:
To create the navigation bar using raw HTML and CSS, I had to use an unordered list with some CSS style rules. I had to write style rules to make the list appear horizontal instead of vertical, and I had to add a rule to get rid of the list’s bullets. This felt like a lot of time and code for something that looked less than stellar. However, when I created the navigation bar using Semantic UI, all I had to do was create a single div for the navigation bar. In fact, everything took less code to make in Semantic UI than it did in raw HTML and CSS, and the new Browser History looked significantly better than the original:
Why Use a Framework?
Some people seem to dislike Semantic UI because customization in Semantic UI is a lot harder than it is in raw HTML and CSS. However, in my experiences thus far, Semantic UI has been a great way to make creating web pages simpler and easier, at least for me. Some of the problems I have with Semantic UI are that sometimes my CSS style rules are overridden by the Semantic UI style rules and changing the layout of web pages to be exactly how I want it can occasionally take some creative coding. Despite this, the amount of time I save using Semantic UI instead of raw HTML and CSS makes it completely worth any problems or issues I might face.