Making HTML and CSS Less Bad

05 Oct 2023

After going in depth with HTML and CSS, I am now familiar with how painful it is to work with HTML and CSS. These two tools alone take a significant amount of effort to make a nice looking website. UI Frameworks such as Bootstrap help ease the process by providing pre-made classes to streamline the website creation experience. But as much as these frameworks can help, they also include a completely new set of things to learn.

HTML and CSS: Two Languages Intertwined

In the past I have covered the basics of HTML and CSS multiple times, never making anything more complex than what could be considered “baby’s first website”. But after finally taking a deeper dive into using the two, I see why people are not fond of using the language. The syntax is overly tedious, and having to manually adjust parameters can be annoying to deal with. Its because of this tedium that frameworks were created to help make the process easier.

Bootstrap: More Complexity

Bootstrap provides many tools to help make a nice looking website without having to take the time to create custom buttons, dividers, etc. Classes such as the row and column help make formatting a website significantly easier. But, there are also many more tools available to use, tools which when used all together can become a mess of things to understand.

For example, the navbar class makes it much easier to make a nice looking navigation bar at the top of your screen, but it also has so many other classes that you need to use in order to make it look nice. You have to use many of these framework classes together in order to make a nice product, on top of making small adjustments in CSS.

Are UI Frameworks worth it?

In the end, I think that UI Frameworks are an incredibly helpful toolkit for the aspiring website designer. Without them, it would be significantly more tedious and frustrating to create an aesthetically appealing website. But using these frameworks can be just as frustrating to learn. While I am glad to have this experience learning how to use these frameworks, I certainly would not like to pursue website development in the future.