Web development is a trendy career to dive into. According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), web development has seen a significant rise in the career path on demand. This invites many people choose a career in web development and make a fortune after applying a right and well planned approach. CSS is inevitably an integral part of studying and using web development.
As you probably know, CSS is extremely important for building websites, however, Cascading Style Sheet which is a complete name of the CSS shortcut also has a number of frameworks. These frameworks can enrich your work with CSS and include a variety of useful functions.
This article will guide you through some of the most popular frameworks for CSS used by web developers.
What exactly CSS is?
If you have just started learning web development or are in the process of figuring the particular points of your education, you might not be completely aware of the nature of CSS. This style-sheet language is solely responsible for the presentation side of the client side website or application. Which is to say, the user side or what a user sees on the screen.
A website without CSS looks in a poorly planned way and does not appeal to the user. Implementing good CSS logic with solid design principals can help to leverage the products or the purpose of the website to a great extent.
Before diving into CSS frameworks, let’s learn what a framework actually is and what it does.
A framework is a software abstraction tool that makes it easier and faster to develop applications by taking a big chunk of declarative or step-by-step coding out and leaving it to the top so that developers can use it with a plug-n-play approach. CSS frameworks do the same job and make it faster to develop the application. Without a framework, a programmer will have to code the same chunks of code completely from scratch which is not just time-consuming but also making the code more prone to bugs.
The most commonly used CSS frameworks
There are tons of popular CSS frameworks out there and it will be impossible to guide you through all of them in this article. Let’s look at the top-used ones. It is quite possible you will need to learn them for your work as well.
The Tailwind CSS framework
Most commonly used are Tailwind CSS. This framework has a number of competitors of similar features as for instance Bulma or Bootstrap, however, it has its unique features which are making the framework highly demanded. The Tailwind CSS framework does not rely on pre-built templates to use but rather owns a set of helper classes and styles. This is a highly useful characteristic of the framework as it allows a coder to quickly develop a project straight out of imagination.
The Bootstrap framework
Then there is Bootstrap which has just been mentioned. Bootstrap is one of the most popular frameworks It gives you an opportunity to choose from tons of pre-built templates. All you need to do is to add the file that connects the library and use classes to deploy various components in any possible way you want.
The Bulma framework
Another popular CSS framework is Bulma which has also been mentioned above. Bulma has a pre-built template approach. Bulma is based on CSS Flex and makes it much more flexible. In practice flexibility means the websites created with Bulma are more responsive. This in turn means such websites can adapt to any device in a particularly efficient way.
Bulma follows a modular design approach that keeps the file neat and organised.
The Pure.css framework
There is Pure.css among the most popular frameworks for CSS. This one is based on Normalize.css and was developed by Yahoo. Pure.css is also founded on the modular files approach. As you can imagine, modular approach allows you to break down chunks of code into smaller components. These components can be reused based on your needs. Again, this will help you to avoid writing 1600, 2000 or more lines of code in one file. Actually, this is not only time-consuming but also makes it excruciatingly tedious to be maintained.
The Foundation.css framework
There is also Foundation.css. This framework incorporates the combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Sass. Foundation.css is a front-end heavy framework. This is primarily used in large-scale applications.
There are many more frameworks such as Skeletons, Materialize or Semantic UI.
Which one should you pick for your project? This answer relies solely on the design planning and features the requirements of your project. Besides, you can always poke around to build small fun applications.