cft

The power of vanilla CSS

After reading this you will get the answer to one of the most asked questions, "Is learning CSS frameworks enough?"


user

Rohit Purkait

a year ago | 2 min read

After reading the title, I guess many of you are thinking that this is going to be just another boring blog, telling about the advantages of CSS. In your mind you are telling yourself that you don't need to read this because you have the gift of powerful component based frameworks like

  • BootStrap
  • Headless UI
  • Chakra UI
  • Material UI

and a lot more. This gift of styling everything just by copying few components from the docs and pasting it in your codebase to make a website without any hassle is alluring for sure. But in this process of getting everything right from the start, destroy your throught process thus, blocking your mind from understanding the basic concepts. Just think, what if a building of 30 feet high had a wobbly base, will it survive for a long time? Obivously not. So, learning from these ready made frameworks makes you that long building with a wobbly base, and you are prone to fall at point of time.

Now, you might be thinking that I am speaking about all these warnings about learning from ready made frameworks without providing any proper reasons. Ok fine, I will give you guys proper reasons for my statements. One of the biggest problems you will face if you learn only from the ready made frameworks is that when you will be assigned to make a website completely unique and out of the box. If you notice carefully, all the websites made using BootStrap or Material UI are more or less the same. They all have the same type of navbar, same type of card layout, same type of footer, etc. That is why, when you will try to make a unique navbar, footer, or anything then you will face a lot of problems because your knowledge of the basics are not clear at all. Another problem that arises is that if somehow any component is not working as expected then you will have no idea about how to fix it because you haven't spent your time learning about the basic concepts of CSS. There are a lot more problems that arise from the above method of learning but I hope you get my point.

One of the most important thing to keep in mind is that from this blog I am not suggesting that you should learn vanilla CSS only. I am also not suggesting you that you should never use CSS frameworks. Because if you do any large scale project then you will realise the true power of frameworks and how it makes your work easier. By writing this, I am only telling you that in the beginning don't start just by learning any framework. Learn the vanilla CSS by reading docs or watching a YouTube video. Learn how to position elements, learn how to make a navbar responsive from scratch. And after spending quite some time, when you get the feeling that you can style any website with vanilla CSS then only pick up a framework and use it in your projects.

So, with this I am marking the end of my blog. This was just the introduction about why vanilla CSS is important. In my later blogs I may teach you some important things about CSS (if you want). But for now, that is all for me.

If you want to know me more then follow me on https://github.com/codeswithroh. I do a lot of projects there which will help you guys a lot. And if you want to ask me anything then send me a mail at codeswithroh@gmail.com

Upvote


user
Created by

Rohit Purkait

Trying to live a simple life.


people
Post

Upvote

Downvote

Comment

Bookmark

Share


Related Articles