It is often said that laziness is the mother of invention. This is evident as most of the everyday technology that we engage with is meant to simplify everyday tasks from smartphones facilitating communication to vehicles expediting travel times to the internet providing access to vast oceans of information. So it is no surprise that when languages such as HTML and CSS were created to build webpages that engineers using them would eventually try to simplify their use in a way that saves them time.
Thus, UI frameworks were born; taking the everyday functionality of languages used for jobs, hobbies and education and simplifying them into a compact and easy-to-use interface that can turn hours of long coding sessions into a fraction of the work. Why spend an hour on a job, when you can spend 10 hours automating it? The return on investment for creating a user friendly framework can save thousands of hours if used regularly.
Take Bootstrap 5, for example. This framework simplifies the creation of web- pages using HTML5 and CSS, which usually tell the webpage specific instructions from sizing of images, to the position of elements relative to anchors and generally describing every aspect of the website’s presentation. Of course, coding every nook and cranny of a webpage can be tedious and involve a lot of copy and pasting as you begin to notice that some types of styling dominate both in popularity and functionality.
As styling a webpage begins to become monotonous and certain style elements become ever-present in subsequent projects, it makes sense to create shorthands for certain styling intentions. For example, modularizing a page into containers containing rows and nested columns can be done with only a few lines of code rather than excessive CSS styling and can save a lot of space in terms of sheer code written.
UI frameworks are essentially the evolution of coding languages, making them easier to write and simplifying code. As they are only frameworks, they rely on the underlying coding language and typically make writing code a simpler and quicker practice. Frameworks are continuing to be built and vary in functionality, but usually lend the user a more efficient and customized experience. Maybe it is a desire for efficiency that is the mother of invention after all.