Getting Frantic With Semantic UI
20 Feb 2018There are lots of different frontend UI frameworks available, some of which include AngularJS, Twitter Bootstrap, React, and many others. These frontend frameworks essentially provide “building blocks” for developers to use and build responsive websites, so that they don’t need to build everything from scratch. These building blocks are essentially pre-styled elements that just work together. They often come with some extra functionality, using small bits of JavaScript to, for example, open a dropdown in a menu, or open a modal popup.
If you’ve used a frontend web UI framework before, then getting started with Semantic UI should be reletively easy, as it utilizes the same basic concepts as most of the others. It allows developers to focus more on the content and functionality of websites without having to worry about implementation details. They simply use elements with built-in CSS classes and JS functionality and use themes to change the overall look. This saves developers time creating styles and classes from scratch to create commonly used constructs, and allows them to work more quickly and efficiently. And of course, developers can still create custom classes and override specific styles to refine and tweak the feel and finer details of the content.
In today’s electronic world, it is increasingly important for website content to appear and function well on any kind and size of device, be it a small mobile phone, or a large desktop monitor. Using a responsive UI framework will allows developers to easily and simply create content that works on all screen sizes, as these frameworks use media queries and sometimes small JavaScript snippets for elements to appear and scale properly, using different layouts for different sizes as necessary. This all allows developers to spend less time on styling the website to work on various devices and again focus more time on content.
Using a responsive UI framework like Semantic UI can really streamline the workflow of website development and save developers time. It should definitely be worth the time it takes to familiarize oneself with the CSS classes and their behavior, as the time spent learning it will pay off in the ease of use and time saved.