A dive into CSS and its frameworks!

A walkthrough into the design world of the web.

Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash

While developing a web page or any software, the three most important building blocks that a developer should know are HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These three form an integral part of every web page, there are many frameworks, libraries, and tools available that enable a developer to fast-track their development process. These frameworks provide a solid structure for developers to build their software. These frameworks act as a foundation for building applications, so instead of starting everything from scratch a developer can use these frameworks and build their application on top of it by adding functionality according to their usage. So today let’s discuss CSS and its frameworks since the design is the very first thing that a user sees and interacts with while surfing on the web.

What is CSS?
CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) is called as style sheet language, it enables the developer to control how the user perceives a particular HTML element. With the help of CSS, a developer can design the whole web page. CSS allows to selectively style each element, it allows the developer to modify each property of an element like fonts, colors, size, spacing, layout, etc. CSS as the name says, works on the cascading principle where the developer can inherit or override different styles. You can learn more about CSS from here.

CSS Frameworks and its importance
Though with the power of CSS, a developer can control the entire look and feel of a web page but sometimes adding the styles can become complex, and ensuring the similarity and responsiveness between different browsers can become tedious and time-consuming, so here comes frameworks for the rescue. There are different css frameworks available which makes all these works easier for the developer. These frameworks come with pre-written, standardized stylesheets that can be used without any worry since these are already been tested for various scenarios hence saving the developer’s work and time. Some of the key benefits of these frameworks are as follows,

• Responsive Design: One of the major advantages of CSS frameworks is the responsive design that they provide, With the help of frameworks the developer can easily modify their stylesheets to be responsive on various devices and screen sizes.
• Uniformity: These frameworks provide consistency in the layout between multiple web pages, by following some predefined rules and stylesheets a developer can ensure a great user experience across their application.
• Improved Development: Since these frameworks provide a pre-written collection of stylesheets, just plugging them into the project can speed up the development process as these frameworks offer different styles for buttons, forms, grids, and other layout elements that are ready to use.
• Cross-Browser Compatibility: These frameworks are designed by keeping various browsers in mind, thus it solves different inconsistencies and errors that a developer gets while designing web pages for multiple browsers.
• Scalable & Accessible: As these frameworks offer modular design and reusable components, Using them the developers can easily scale their projects when needed without disturbing the existing codebase. Apart from these, there are many css frameworks that provides the in-built accessibility that are recommended for making the websites easy to use for people with disabilities.
• Customization: Though CSS frameworks come with pre-written stylesheets, they also allow the developers to modify or customize styles according to their requirements.
• Community Support: There are many popular frameworks like Bootstrap, tailwind CSS, foundation, etc that have a large developer community that actively contributes to the improvement of the framework, Additionally they also provide various resources, documentation, and tutorials to help the developers to utilize the frameworks to their fullest.

With so many benefits of frameworks, let’s now see what are the most popular frameworks available.

Bootstrap: It is the fast, powerful, and extensible framework for building responsive websites, it utilizes a prebuilt grid system and components, and it also comes with javascript plugins, themes, icons, and various components thus making it easy for the developer to easily add modals, popovers, tooltips and many more events on the site.

Tailwind CSS: It is the utility-first CSS framework, the framework’s utility classes help to work within the constraints of the system without messing up with the stylesheets. Tailwind follows a mobile-first approach, thus it makes it easy to create designs that are responsive across all screen sizes and devices. Tailwind also improves the performance by automatically removing all the unused CSS when the project is about to be deployed to production, thus making the CSS bundle as small as possible.

Bulma: It is a modern framework that is open source and provides ready-to-use front-end components, it’s components can be easily combined to create responsive interfaces. It is built with flexbox and has the simplest grid system that resizes themselves according to the columns that have been added, it is also modular which means just importing the things that are needed is what is required to get started. It is the CSS-only framework which means no javascript is required which makes it easy to integrate with any javascript environment.

Semantic UI: Semantic UI can create responsive design, the class names in this framework are derived from the natural languages that is used in our everyday life like nouns, modifiers, etc which even a novice will be able to use, even javascript uses phrases to add some functionality that makes it super easy for every beginner to use it, you can check more about this framework from its official documentation.

These are the few popular frameworks that I have used but there are plenty of other frameworks available that you can use, Layout and design of the website play a pivotal role that keeps the user hooked to the site and hence it must be carefully designed by keeping all the factors in mind, so make sure that you explore multiple frameworks and choose the one that suits your project requirements.