A user interface, UI for short, is the front most part of software development because it’s what people will see. Using HTML, UI can be made by many different frameworks, most commonly CSS, a simple but very versatile coding language. CSS can make UI nice, clean, and pretty. CSS, however, is easy to learn but hard to master, due to its robustness. In CSS, trying to change the font color or size, would require modifying HTML tags such as “a”, “h” headers, “p” paragraph, etc. within CSS itself or make a class for the tags to utilize. This takes time and it feels annoying to do it over and over and over. However, as stated before, there are other frameworks such as Semantic UI.
Semantic UI makes making a UI simpler, sort of. With semantic UI, users can initialize a ton of classes that can easily make a nice clean UI. If the user wanted to create a menu, semantic UI has a class where a user can just type in the class, “ui menu”, using a div tag and voila, anything in the div tag and closing tag will be part of the menu. The issue with this is, every tab will be lumped together. In Semantic UI, the users can create a item; the item class is mostly used to separate things, so if the user wants to space out his menu, they would create multiple items for the menu to make multiple tabs. Semantic UI also has multiple variations and types for each class which can affect color, size, shape, and even alignment of items. An example with the menu, the user could type, “ui medium menu”, which will change the size of the menu, instead of CSS where the height and width would have to be specified.
Semantic UI however, is actually similar to CSS, which is easy to learn but hard to master. Even in Semantic UI, the user would have to do the same thing in CSS to just change font size or color. Create a class or modify the semantic ui class itself instead of the tags, which makes it a bit easier but it does affect all instances of that specific class which could be time-consuming to differentiate classes. With all these frameworks, mastering them does come with a big payoff, it will become easy to make a nice looking site and even recreate site with beautiful UI to incorporate into your site.