Link tags: trap

You Don’t Need A UI Framework — Smashing Magazine

We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.

I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.

This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.

The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.

If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.

Ralph Lavelle: On resilience

Thoughts on frameworks, prompted by a re-reading of Resilient Web Design. I quite like the book being described as a “a bird’s-eye view of the whole web design circus.”

Who Are Design Systems For? | CSS-Tricks

Chris ponders the motivations behind companies sharing their design systems publicly. Personally, I’ve always seen it as a nice way of sharing work and saying “here’s what worked for us” without necessarily saying that anyone else should use the same system.

That said, I think Chris makes a good poin here:

My parting advice is actually to the makers of public design systems: clearly identify who this design system is for and what they are able to do with it.

Front-end development is not a problem to be solved | CSS-Tricks

The sentiment is that front-end development is a problem to be solved: “if we just have the right tools and frameworks, then we might never have to write another line of HTML or CSS ever again!” And oh boy what a dream that would be, right?

Well, no, actually. I certainly don’t think that front-end development is a problem at all.

What Robin said.

I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Autonomous Trap 001 | Flickr

Oh, James!

CABINET // Trap Streets

A fascinating piece by James on trap streets, those fictitious places on maps that have no corresponding territory.

Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap is Twitter’s CSS and markup style guide—very similar to the pattern portfolios that we often provide as deliverables at Clearleft.