I am sure you have heard about CSS Grid and Flexbox by now. If you haven’t you had better think about your dev skills. Go give a long hard look at what you’re doing cuz this is the future of web and may just replace all the frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap. I only name the most notable because there are a ton of them. The CSS frameworks should be especially worried about their existence. Do not take this is the wrong way, I am not saying that we will see this happen tomorrow or even next year but at the rate that Browsers are making these core standards, it is possible this will happen sooner than we may like.
I am a Huuugggee fan of Foundation and if we look closely we can see they are scrambling to keep up. At least this is the way I perceive it looking from the outside in. They have had some frequent updating lately, unlike Bootstrap who is seemingly lackadaisical if we compare the two. Foundation has pushed out at least two major updates in the last year and probably have been planning for this much longer. Will we continue to use these frameworks when it is so easy to implement a responsive grid with less code and possibly better operability with the advent of PWA’s, Amp plus Vue? I almost see frameworks struggling to survive unless they make the decision to team up with some of these Javascript libraries and of course making it easy to implement. With how the Browser based drag and drop Editors are advancing you would be foolish not to use them if you have a quick mock-up or site to kick out. Have you seen some of these in the last few months? I will mention one that I have found to be very useful lately. Webflow is pretty easy to use especially if you use Adobe products. Webflow has designed their editor to be a similar experience to Adobe products. At least it feels that way to me.
I am pretty excited about the latest advances to CSS and what it means for marking up a site. If we really embrace these technologies I think it will greatly improve the look and feel of our sites and totally speed up the process. We have major control of the whole layout without all the hacks now and it isn’t very hard to implement which makes me think this is finally the right direction. When I was learning CSS I felt like I was just hacking things together and now it just feels right. It seems intuitive and natural to the way my mind works and I really think that it will stand the test of time. It also makes it much easier for these browser based editors to implement their editors to output much cleaner code. The problem they have had since the beginning. The reason many people didn’t use those editors was that they were pushing out huge amounts of code which in turn made their sites very slow. Now with the easy markup, those editors can reason about much better and implement a decently coded site that is fast and clean. Advancement all around which is better for some not so much for others. Developers will have a tough fight ahead to convince someone to use their wares instead of using one of the drag and drop editors. The point I make here is that a developer needs to embrace these new technologies so they can make better sites than these editors can. Using Javascript frameworks to make sites very, very fast and mobile ready and most importantly usable when offline. Something the drag and droppers cannot do.
This article is getting too long and this topic will be discussed further in future. This issue will get more and more interesting as time goes by and will warrant many more talks. As always I may be a dumdumdev but I am not stupid! Happy coding dumdum’s!
DumDumDev 