Expanding the Toolbox
06 Oct 2016Hello World
Semantic UI has been a journey to learn and get used to. Learning Semantic UI has pretty much been learning a new language for me. I have had no prior experience with using HTML or CSS classes so I was already confused and overwhelmed at the start of the lesson, but I was eager to add a new tool to my toolbox. When comparing other things I have learned in the past I see how HTML and CSS are easier to use than a traditional programming language. Everything is nicely labeled and you can make cool looking web pages with just some random pictures you can steal from google and impress your friends, and the code itself looks pretty intuitive. There aren’t many complex syntaxes like for loops or while loops, everything is just wrapped in labels to make it easier to see. I feel like Semantic UI is simply an extension or a combination of HTML and CSS, and is not that complex to learn and is more than likely, worth one’s time.
Semantic UI
Semantic UI branches off of the idea of intuitiveness that HTML and CSS have already founded, and simply expanded on it. Making actual sentences in the classes to create objects makes it even more intuitive and easier to understand/read and even write while working with Semantic UI. Since I had just learned HTML from free code camp, I was already pretty overwhelmed by having to learn a new language, and when we started learning about Semantic UI, I felt it was nearly exactly the same, but maybe even easier. I like how when making a project in HTML one can constantly see their progress building up and getting closer to the completed project that looks really cool. And I never thought that learning Semantic UI was frustrating, I felt like it was adding another tool in the toolbox. Learning different languages and being able to use them properly seems like an important part of being a programmer/software engineer, and it was exciting to be able to add another tool. I don’t really know a good reason to say that raw HTML and CSS is better than using Semantic UI since I’m not really experienced but I feel like things are much easier to make using Semantic UI. I don’t even know how to make a dropdown menu in HTML but I feel pretty confident about making something like that using Semantic UI. Some reasons I believe that it would benefit software engineers for reasons stated previously. Learning anything new when it comes to one’s field of interest will almost never be a drawback. The information is invaluable and always be useful in the future, so taking the time to add a shiny new tool to the box would most definitely be a good idea. I’m not one hundred percent sure, but there are probably things that Semantic UI can do that raw HTML and CSS would not be able to do, so being able to implement them for a customer in the future would ostensibly be beneficial. I have never used another framework but I think Semantic UI was pretty easy and fun to learn, although I am no expert or fluent in the language in any way.
Conclusion
Conclusively, Semantic UI and HTML and CSS in general have been a pretty fun experience and I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn them in this class. They are useful for making webpages and could be important in the future if asked to make a client a webpage of some sort. Semantic UI is pretty much an extension of HTML and can be used to create even more things that HTML may not be able to and is a beneficial tool for software engineers to be able to know and implement in the future.