At the whims of my heart and my soul

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At the whims of my heart and my soul

What's better than Lana del Rey?

Not much. But Lana del Rey singing with her father on his piano album is pretty amazing and Rob Grant is a wonderful piano player. My gosh he just plays it so beautifully. 

Lana's two collabs with her father, "Hollywood Bowl" and "Lost at Sea", the former of which this blog post titles cites, are two of the softest and gentlest Lana songs that I have ever heard. And nobody does softness and gentleness like Lana does.

And that is one of the things that I love about her. Because she can stop me. And get me to pause. And slow me down. And there are times when nobody else can do this.

And I love her softness, and her gentleness - so dearly.


I have been focussing on CSS frameworks today, so let me talk about those.

I am catching up on Week 2 of my Front-End module, which I missed because I was ill. Whoop whoop exciting times!

Why would you use CSS frameworks?

A CSS framework is a bit like a JavaScript library I guess.

It usually provides pre-existing styles, layouts and components that allow you do build websites more efficiently.

Their in-built responsive design features are great, as this is something I believe can be quite hard to achieve otherwise.

Consistency and Standardisation

Using a CSS framework allows you to be more consistent and to standardise your design.

That means that the language you use inside of your application is also consistent. As well as your design patterns.

It helps developers ensure that their UIs have a consistent look and feel, which, as we discussed yesterday is really important to have for a good user experience.

Modularity and Reusability

You can use CSS frameworks to break your UIs down into components. 

This makes it easier to reuse them across different parts of the application. This can also simplify testing. This also saves time and energy for developers, increasing efficiency.

Responsiveness and Flexibility

CSS frameworks make responsive design easier to achieve.

This is partly achieved by these frameworks providing things such as responsive grid systems, and flexible components.

Accessibility and Usability

Apparently, these frameworks can make it easier for you to implement accessibility in your products. They are designed to adhere to web accessibility best practice standards and so it makes sense.

Performance Optimisation

CSS frameworks are designed with performance optimisation in mind and can help and support with this. Basically, they can get your program to run faster and more efficiently.

Class Name CSS Frameworks

(non-component-based design frameworks)

These "leverage class names to apply predefined styles and components". This means that you can add class names to HTML elements as well to style them.

They provide similar benefits to 'traditional' CSS frameworks, such as:
  • Consistency and standardisation
  • Modularity and reusability 
  • Flexibility and customisation
    • This is achieved by combining and/or modifying class names
  • Responsive design
  • Component-based styling
    • The styling of components, can be easily modified, by modifying class names.
  • Performance optimisation
    • These class name CSS frameworks generate minimal and optimised CSS.
To quote directly from my course, "class name CSS frameworks give us the ability to use pre-defined class names in order to quickly style HTML components".

Component Based CSS Frameworks

The use of these is becoming increasingly popular. They revolve around reusable components. These components re-use both markup and styling.

Once again, consistency and standardisation is one of the most popular themes. 
Consistency not only enhances the user experience, but also simplifies the developer experience. 

Another commonly reoccurring theme in this lesson is modularity and reusability. 

For example, these frameworks allow developers to build complex UIs while maintaining consistent code.

Oooh, here is a new one - how exciting!!! drumroll...

Isolation and Encapsulation

Components are "Self-contained". This means that: their styling does not affect, and/or is not affected by, that of other components.

This means devs can build features while worrying less about breaking another dev's features. 

Scoped and Specific Styling

This confines the styles of a component to a specific component, preventing one component from accidentally overriding another component's styles.

I have to admit that I don't really understand what the difference is between this and 'isolation and encapsulation'. 

Composition and Hierarchy

This allows developers to combine multiple smaller components into fewer larger ones.

This promotes the parent-child relationship that is reminiscent of the DOM or of React or even (to some extent) of classes in JavaScript.

Customisation and Theming

It is past 5 pm on a Friday and my brain is fried and I am struggling to define this.

These frameworks, as well as pre-defined components, they can provides customisation and theming capabilities.

I guess what this means is that: you can benefit from the efficiency that is provided by reusable components. 

But you can also make these components more unique and more personalised and style them to make them your own.

Performance Optimisation (once again)

This is an interesting theme which has been coming up a lot today which I was not expecting.

This includes things like lazy loading which means if the connection is slow or whatever you don't load things like images... I think.

A bit more on the benefits of component based CSS frameworks

If your components are:
  • Independent
  • Reusable
  • Easily maintainable
Then you can:
  • Enhance the organisation of your code
  • Promote the reusability of your code (saves time! more efficient!)
  • Make any future updates and modifications to your code more streamlined.

Why would anybody choose a job...

... where it stays hard for the rest of your life.

I don't know, I guess.

I guess it's just because of the fact that... I love it.





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