Friendly Front-End Web Development
23 Feb 2017
According to the Semantic UI website, the goal of the framework is to empower designers and developers “by creating a language for sharing UI”. They do this by leveraging a semantic, descriptive language for its classes and naming conventions. Instead of using abbreviations, as other frameworks do, it utilizes real words in a manner closer to plain English. Another thing that I noticed is the package, very well organized, every component if you want has its own stylesheet and script-file, therefore you’ll be able to load only what you need, even because the package is quite heavy if you include everything in a single page.
For a pre-release I admit that I’m considering to build my next web-app with such framework, but I got some perplexities:
Is that mobile-first like Bootstrap or Semantic-UI or Foundation? From what I’m able to see, it doesn’t look so; Bootstrap has two valid and well-known contributors and Foundation got Zurb behind, what about SemanticUI? This is a pre-release, are we going to see other releases?
Because of such perplexities, I think to avoid to use it for a business or commercial project at the moment, maybe in a very near future, but if anyone is planning to use it for their own personal web-app and non-customized development usage, I think it’s a pretty good choice.
The learning curve for these kind of frameworks are small, except maybe, the grid system. I realized that Semantic-UI doesn’t dictate you how to use it. You can throw a class here, and another there, and still get job done.
The first time I used Semantic UI, I was working on imitating websites for my software engineering course in college. I came to conclusion that You have to learn a lot of stuff to get started. In some cases, the widgets I needed required Semantic UI JavaScript to be loaded. This didn’t give me flexibility I wanted. It is rich on ready to use widgets. It gets complex tasks done, if you have time to explore what it has to offer. Bottom line, the choice is going to depend on your project. If you want a full-fledged, tightly-coupled framework Semantic UI may be a good choice. If you want minimum to achieve better results, then go with Bootstrap.
The time I spent on learning the different classes and methods to create the look for a certain webpage accrued significantly in the beginning not because of the workload but it was because I was getting addicted to the customization features. It was easy to find out how to add the details to the site so I immediately wanted to show off the web pages to people and asked them if they wanted to learn. I concluded that it doesn’t take much to build a fundamental understanding for web development because the language doesn’t require raw HTML formatting. When I say raw I meant lower level coding with syntax that only veterans programmers would know about. Like the name itself “semantic” is of relating to the meaning in language or logic so it’s easy to comprehend and apply the framework style. However, the knowledge to create something completely out of the box calls for some heavy JavaScript, CSS and HTML manipulations that I have to yet to try. A great example is A-Frame. It is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences. It was started by Mozilla VR to make WebVR content creation easier, faster, and more accessible. Developers are cracking on threeJS to make users like me to create 3-d websites. In conclusion, I think semantic-ui is a very friendly user interface tool for customization. Since it is so easily used and maintained, people will soon realize that they won’t need professionals to create modern appealing commercialized pages and they can just make one themselves.