UI Frameworks require Imagination
22 Feb 2024UI Frameworks
Bootstrap 5
There are many reasons that we would, or I would use Bootstrap 5 in developing websites. It’s the old saying, “don’t reinvent the wheel”. Using Bootstrap 5 would help with building responsive design using built-in classes and components that create responsive layouts. Using component style based classes allows for faster development becuase it allows us to edit existing classes to quickly get things in order. Furthermore, with pre built classes it allows for consistency and compatibility. This compatibility allows for us to ensure different components across the website is standardized. I noticed that customization of the Bootsratp 5 librarys can meet specific needs and was easily customizable. This allowed for sepcific looks and UI tools like buttons or structure to be made.
obstacles
In regards to the obstacles that I faced when writing my HTML was the imagination. I have issues with styling, inserting content into a website is easy for me but when you tell me make the UI of the website similar to another. It was difficult, for two reasons. First reason, requires understanding of the HTML structure. Once you understand the framework of the website then you can develop a plan of action of sorts to address those. In many of our WODS we attmpted to copy a website UI framework but used previously built websites as a template. This was indeed challenging becuase of the fact that we had to alter the visuals and test the code. Testing the code allowed us to see the changes but gave little help, additional using ChatGPT or other AI didn’t help since they can’t build a website excatly to meet to the sepcific needs of your UI. Secondly, imagination was needed to anticipate the changes that you would make to a website. Without a understanding of how the style sheet affected the HTML then you can’t really anticipate or predict the viusal of the website.
Return on Investments
Although the difficulties in the WOD’s and the understanding of Bootstrap 5, it’s important and relevant to software engineering for several reasons. One reason is that it is a library in which you are able to referrence in order to quickly deploy a website. Secondly its predicitable with some understaning of Bootstrap, once you understand the content you can easily predict how the component of the website will be built. Additionally, it becomes easier to read and allows us to really attempt to edit these components in order to develop a functioning UI. Overall, many of parts of the boostraps 5 and UI framework we worked on were indeed helpful, but it still required many, many iterations in order for me to understand the component based style rather than raw CSS styling, which I was originally used too.
Content that I found useful
There is a person on the internet that records himself doing ASMR programming where he codes the UI framework of an entire website from scracth using no Bootstrap 5. I thought it was amazing and indeed I used to watch and learn many of the way to build the website. I was inspired to build websites when I built my first one and used no Bootstrap 5. I will say, comparing using raw HTML and CSS to Bootstrap 5 I could see how the time it took for me to develop a website would dramatically go down. Component based style coding was first introduced to me by React Native, when building websites by component based language was getting popular. At first it was completely different from HTML and CSS raw programming, thus the learning curve was pretty intense. But, I believe that with my knowledge now with
ASMR Programming Video
