Good medicine tastes bitter. People say, nothing could be achieved without the cost it deserves. I guess that’s fair. If not, life would be too easy. But never have I thought Semantic UI would be this hard to “get along with.”
Semantic UI to me is a dictionary of some foreign language I don’t even know and writing HTML codes with Semantic UI would be writing a letter in the language. What’s worse, the dictionary is one way; you don’t have vocabulary entry in English, but with that language. This sounds tough. You have to start from scratch and the dictionary is only useful if you already know how the word you’re trying to look up is spelled. You cannot use the dictionary to figure out how an English word is translated into the language.
This is exactly how I feel about Semantic UI. One one hand, there are plenty of new features that can be achieved and they are all amazing! Semantic UI definitely saves us time and effort to build a website using raw HTML. But again, life was not that easy. Writing HTML with Semantic UI is a nightmare so far. First, you have to know the “parts.” Yes, there are plenty of useful components like ui container, grid, message, dropdown, image, and more and more. However, in order for you to be able to make use of them, you have to know what choices you have. You have to know what you can do with dropdown, you have to know how “center aligned” keyword affects, you have to know there’s something called “columns.” All these background knowledge, even before using! And the online resource is always one way: you have to know before searching. It is never like “how do I make my web page look like this?” but more like “okay, so this is how I use ui grid.” How would I know I could’ve just used ui grid if I am a total newbie?
After all, I like Semantic UI and I am amazed of its possibilities. In the future, I would still keep struggling to figure out how to make a website as I want, but this framework will forever be essential and beneficial to my career as a programmer. I will be lost in the “dictionary” but what I can do with Semantic UI totally deserves it.