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Material UI vs mini.css: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In web development, choosing the right CSS framework is crucial for designing modern and responsive user interfaces. Two popular frameworks in this context are Material UI and mini.css. Both frameworks offer a wide range of components and styles to enhance the visual appeal of websites.
Design Aesthetic: Material UI follows Google's Material Design guidelines, which focus on clean, minimalistic designs with depth and shadows. On the other hand, mini.css aims for simplicity and compactness, providing a lightweight and streamlined design aesthetic.
Component Library: Material UI offers a comprehensive library of ready-to-use React components that are highly customizable, making it suitable for complex applications. Mini.css, on the other hand, provides a minimalistic set of CSS classes that can be combined to create custom components, making it ideal for smaller projects or rapid prototyping.
Themability: Material UI allows for easy theming and customization through the use of themes and palettes, enabling developers to create visually consistent interfaces. Mini.css, on the other hand, offers limited theming options but focuses on maintaining a consistent and coherent design language across its components.
Support for Frameworks: Material UI is primarily designed for React applications, providing seamless integration with React's component-based architecture. Mini.css, on the other hand, is framework-agnostic and can be used with any front-end framework or even vanilla HTML/CSS projects, offering flexibility in terms of compatibility.
Complexity and Learning Curve: Material UI, with its rich set of features and customization options, can have a steeper learning curve for beginners or developers new to React. Mini.css, being more lightweight and straightforward, is easier to grasp, making it a suitable choice for those looking for simplicity and quick implementation.
Community and Documentation: Material UI has a large and active community, extensive documentation, and frequent updates, providing ample resources for developers to troubleshoot issues and find solutions. Mini.css, while not as extensive, still maintains a supportive community and solid documentation, ensuring developers have the necessary support to work with the framework effectively.
In Summary, Material UI and mini.css differ in design aesthetic, component library, themability, framework support, complexity, and community resources, catering to different needs and preferences in web development.
I replaced Bootstrap with Material-UI during the front-end UI development, because Material-UI adopts a component-based importing style, making it suit well in a "React programming style". This makes me comfortable when programming because I can treat importing UI components as other React components I define.
As our team will be building a web application, HTML5 and CSS3 are one of the standardized combinations to implement the structure and the styling of a webpage. Material-UI comes with all sorts of predesigned web components such as buttons and dropdowns that will save us tons of development time. Since it is a component library designed for React, it suits our needs. However, we do acknowledge that predesigned components may sometimes cause pains especially when it comes to custom styling. To make our life even easier, we also adopted Tailwind CSS. It is a CSS framework providing low-level utility classes that will act as building blocks when we create custom designs.
Fonts and typography are fun. Material Design is a framework (developed by Google) that basically geeks out on how to assemble your typographical elements together into a design language. If you're into fonts and typography, it's fantastic. It provides a theming engine, reusable components, and can pull different user interfaces together under a common design paradigm. I'd highly recommend looking into Borries Schwesinger's book "The Form Book" if you're going to be working with Material UI or are otherwise new to component design.
https://www.amazon.com/Form-Book-Creating-Printed-Online/dp/0500515085
Pros of Material-UI
- React141
- Material Design82
- Ui components60
- CSS framework30
- Component25
- Looks great14
- Responsive12
- Good documentation12
- LESS9
- Ui component8
- Open source7
- Code examples6
- Flexible6
- JSS5
- Angular3
- Very accessible3
- Fun3
- Supports old browsers out of the box3
- Typescript support2
- # of components2
- Interface2
- Designed for Server Side Rendering2
- Support for multiple styling systems1
- Css1
- Easy to work with1
- Accessibility1
Pros of mini.css
- Works great on mobile and loads very fast4
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Cons of Material-UI
- Hard to learn. Bad documentation35
- Hard to customize28
- Hard to understand Docs21
- Bad performance8
- Extra library needed for date/time pickers7
- For editable table component need to use material-table7
- Typescript Support2
- # of components1
