The Price Framers Face
24 Feb 2022What are UI frameworks
An important aspect of software engineering is the development of web pages. Everybody uses the internet which has caused a unique era of global communication. The easiest way for companies to provide access points to their products are through web pages. The development of web pages started off almost primitively. Every web page had the same barebones white background, blue hyperlinks, and basic theming. HTML has very little customization and design capabilities, mainly allowing for the placement of information. CSS was introduced in order to allow groups (or divs) of information that was written in HTML to be specifically styled. While CSS helped bring web pages to life, engineers found it too difficult to create large scale projects with a consistent theme. Thus, people thought to create a blueprint that allows engineers to take elements of CSS and upscale it to allow quicker development of projects, which are called “UI Frameworks”.
The Past
Reddit is a forum that has risen to prominence since its creation in 2005. Old Reddit was basically all coded in pure HTML and CSS resulting in this basic design.
While there may have been frameworks in place already, they are not sophisticated at all and are mainly for thematics and simplification. The site was very basic, not even including any image previews for posts. However, it included the necessary functions for the purpose of being a platform that allows users to share their experiences and knowledge with one another.
The Present
Currently, Reddit is one of the top social media platforms in the United States and has millions of daily active users. The website has undergone massive changes in design since it’s launch in 2005 and it continues to become more intuitive and helpful. There are now ways to sort subreddits based on how popular a post might have become recently, how new it is, or how popular it is on the subreddit overall. While these changes may not have been directly caused by the use and improvement of Reddit’s proprietary framework, an admin on Reddit has stated that external frameworks have been utilized in cohesion with the main RedditUI.
The Takeaway
UI Frameworks have emerged in order to simplify the process of developing and theming aspects of markdown languages like HTML. While there are many benefits to utilizing frameworks, a very early Reddit post has an interesting analogy about why they dislike frameworks. Learning about the inner workings of a framework can become tedious and hard to manage, similar to learning a new language. With there being many different frameworks out there, managing how to manage the frameworks can become tricky as well. Frameworks have many different inner workings and it’s very frustrating when you can’t do something that seems simple. The choice to utilize frameworks or not is all up to the developer and if it works for their situation.