That's Just Semantics!
08 Oct 2020<h2>This Is HTML</h2>
I have to admit something. Using HTML is still something that is still quite new to me. I’ve used HTML in the past but never really understood what I was doing. My first experience with HTML was to prank my friends by faking a website’s text. I understood HTML enough to edit a website’s text using “Inspect Element” but that’s about it. Every time I used HTML I felt like I was reverse engineering lines of code. I literally had to look up how to do every single thing in HTML like adding headers, images, and elements. I never had any sense of fluency in the language until recently. About two weeks ago I took the time to study the ins and outs of HTML. So far, I find HTML to be quite easy to learn and understand. Learning HTML and CSS took less than a few hours to get the hang of.
Coding With Style
Being able to code is not enough. You not only have to know how to code, you have to know how to code with style! That is where CSS comes in. HTML and CSS go together like peanut butter and jelly! Like HTML, CSS was also quite easy to learn. CSS allowed me to take my HTML code and add some flavor. No more black text on a white background. Now I could format my site and determine the color, size, spacing, and positioning of various elements. However, using pure HTML and CSS proved to be a pain when creating a sleek modern website. Using pure HTML and CSS made my websites look like they came straight out of 1999. That is where learning UI Frameworks come in.
Setting the Framework
Learning a UI Framework can be time-consuming. The UI Framework I spent time learning was Semantic UI, hence the title. I found myself spending much more time learning how to use Semantic UI than both HTML and CSS combined. It was much like learning a new programming language. Learning Semantic UI required me to learn tons of class names for elements, collections, and modules. It was a lot to learn but Semantic UI makes learning easy since all of the class names are meaningful and intuitive. Creating a red button is as simple as typing “red button”.
Why Bother With Semantics?
If learning a UI Framework such as Semantic UI takes as much effort as learning a new programming language, then why bother? I cannot speak for other UI Frameworks as I have never used them but I can speak for Semantic UI. After my experience with Semantic UI, I found that the time spent learning is well worth it. Using pure HTML and CSS is a pain to type and look at in my honest opinion. The fact that Semantic UI is so intuitive allowed me to create beautiful modern websites with ease. With Semantic UI I was able to create my own website in less than an hour. I’m sure that with more practice, I can accomplish that in a few minutes. No longer did my websites look like they came out of 1999. Using Semantic, I was also able to recreate copies of websites. Creating a professional-looking website really made me proud and I would love to experiment with creating more websites in the future.