Font End website development frameworks have recently gained very high popularity and are considered as modern web standards. If you are a web designer then you must have ever used at least one popular front-end framework. Well known frameworks like Bootstrap, one of the popular and almost all web designers love to use it, Foundation – another hot framework which has enticed a large group of web designers due to its range of features and capability, and the Skeleton, a beautiful boilerplate for responsive and mobile friendly development; has been widely accepted by nearly world’s all web designers.
Frameworks have certainly made life easy for many however are there any drawbacks for Front End HTML Developers? And should they be cautious about anything when using any of the Front End Frameworks? Let’s find out some positive and negative points in below points.
What are Frameworks?
Technology uprising has produced really great amount of tools in front of us and have remarkably reduced stress and boosted up web development methods. Frameworks – a broad term and in fact today we have multiple types of front end development frameworks, each has unique set of features and different purposes. Some popular and high level frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap and foundations provide out of the box and rich features allowing web designers to build highly creative and interactive websites without much need for customization. You can read here about various Popular Front End Frameworks.
Benefits of using Frameworks
- Frameworks have been built with well-tested code. Experienced team of <strong>HTML developers</strong> have worked on frameworks and produced set of tools and features making it easy to do modern Front End HTML Development including responsive website development. One major advantage of using framework is that you are likely to develop a website that will run smoothly over a range of browsers and mobile devices.
- Major frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation have undergone numerous iterations and have become an excellent learning tool for those enthusiasts new to this profession. Experienced PSD to HTML developers can take inspiration from these easy to use beautiful frameworks. Going through line by line code of these frameworks, can teach developers a valuable lesson and adopt best HTML development practice.
- Frameworks provide informative platform for inexperienced developers. There are so many creative heads who have excellent ideas but lack technical knowledge to convert creative designs into a real website. Frameworks certainly help them closer and provide huge possibilities to get their ideas developed quickly and effectively.
- Frameworks can be an ideal place for building robust website easily, by taking care of boilerplate code and default styles, developers can focus on giving a unique flair and adding out of the box functionalities to their websites.
Drawback of using Frameworks
- Use of frameworks restricts to technically advance your own web development knowledge and skills. The in-depth structural understanding of HTML is likely to be overlooked as you will get used to using preset tools and features presented in front of you. So the knowledge advancement and logical coding skills are likely to suffer some set back. There will be lesser original concepts and code development.
- For an experienced front end developer, starting a project from scratch is often faster than taking the help of a framework. Web development is set of logics and well-considered discipline, if you have complete control over project needs and you have a better understanding and clear ideas about how to implement it, then you may come to realize that rather than relying on the framework, your own code will be enough that you don’t require any external needs.
- Since the frameworks have been launched, numerous websites have been built. You may notice that same type of navigation bars; button, fonts and grid style website are floating on the web. With default style provided by frameworks it has lead to generic websites with diminutive creativity. So a repetitive and common pattern is seen more often reducing uniqueness and original creative concept development.
- Web technologies are evolving so quickly, if you stop updating your website with the latest web standards and methods, you could be left far behind in this high towering competition era. When it comes to updating the version of the framework, it can lead to breaking down your website or may also result in any important functionality of your website to stop working. When you are using someone else’s code, you need to wait to implement the latest web methods into your website till the framework team upgrades to the latest version. In short, if you are using a framework that means your code is more dependent and controlled by Framework developers.
Final thoughts
As an experienced web development company, we have seen several web revolutions such as usage of Front End HTML development using frameworks. We too use Boostrap and other frameworks. Usage of frameworks would depend a lot on budget, project size and functionality requirement. For high end creative projects we would go by custom HTML development and have more control on our code. But for budget and small to midsize projects or websites with less complex functionality and design, it may be a good idea to use Frameworks. From web industry expert’s point of view and technically speaking, Frameworks are brilliant and full credit to the teams who have contributed immensely and producing these master pieces in front of us. We train our HTML developers team in building strong fundamentals of core HTML structure as well as how efficiently they can use frameworks. There is promising future and Frameworks are only going to get better.