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Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#21

Post by Eridrus »

fusiongyro wrote: post #4

Basically, it's because we expect markup to have meaning. The situation is pretty different from what it was with a traditional GUI builders because of the markup hiding back there. In the bad old days, Dreamweaver had visual tools for this stuff, and it generated a horrifying mess of nested tables. This was rightly criticized because it made for a huge amount of markup, the markup was difficult to embed in a generat…

This is probably historically true, but I don't see why a WYSIWYG editor for CSS based layouts could not exist?

I'm not a front end developer, and don't really have any desire to become one, and I would like to have a GUI for building fairly standard UIs.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#22

Post by fusiongyro »

Eridrus wrote: post #21
fusiongyro wrote: post #4

Basically, it's because we expect markup to have meaning. The situation is pretty different from what it was with a traditional GUI builders because of the markup hiding back there. In the bad old days, Dreamweaver had visual tools for this stuff, and it generated a horrifying mess of nested tables. This was rightly criticized because it made for a huge amount of markup, the markup was difficult to embed in a generat…

This is probably historically true, but I don't see why a WYSIWYG editor for CSS based layouts could not exist? I'm not a front end developer, and don't really have any desire to become one, and I would like to have a GUI for building fairly standard UIs.

"Why hasn't X happened?" History explaining why X hasn't happened. "Yeah, but why couldn't it happen?"

Yeah, it totally could happen. Go make it and I promise I'll start using it.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#23

Post by jff »

drdaeman wrote: post #18

There was a time when they were popular. Then, such tools were declared "uncool" (not without good reasons - the markup wasn't particularly good) by semantic markup movement, around the time of tables-vs-divs wars. Semantics had withered away since then. No one cared, and it eventually got replaced with a bunch of s on the DOM side and JS-virtual-DOM-all-the-way on how it's generated and managed. Editors haven't caug…

The 'withering' of semantic markup is one of the greatest tragedies of the modern web.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#24

Post by wvenable »

In addition to all the good points made here (designs are static, different devices, etc) it's also because WYSIWYG editors just are plain inefficient. It's faster and easier to work with text. The best tools and technology work on text (copy/paste, git, sass, etc). Most people use HTML/CSS IDEs the provide the same level of power as programming language IDEs.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#25

Post by intrasight »

The software industry largely decided to use HTML for the front end, it also largely gave up the 20 years of R&D on GUI design tools for existing semantically rich front-end frameworks. If Motif were FOSS or if CMU hadn't handed license rights to Andrew WM to IBM, we'd have probably avoided this whole mess that is HTML.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#26

Post by jasoncrawford »

The best current real-world example to look at would be Apple's Interface Builder for iOS. Why doesn't everyone use IB?

The biggest reasons in my experience are:

* Limited logic. A builder is fine for a simple static layout. How should that layout change depending on the data to be displayed? How should it adapt to different screen dimensions and orientations? Pretty soon you want to write code to control the view.

* Doesn't play well with source control. Even if the GUI builder spits out a text-based format like XML, it's hard to read and understand diffs, and it can be difficult to impossible to merge.

Why don't use tools to make writing HTML/CSS less boilerplate? To some extent we do. We have CSS preprocessors and HTML templating.

In the end, the front end is just code, and no one has yet come up with a graphical form of coding that is superior to text.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#27

Post by mxuribe »

lj3 wrote: post #15

There's a huge separation between who designs the frontend and who implements the frontend. To date, none of the frontend editors are good enough to completely replace the need for a programmer to wire up actions. Even back in the Flash days, you needed an ActionScript programmer to make your webapp do anything meaningful. Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to…

"...centering an object horizontally and vertically consistently is still a surprisingly difficult endeavor..." This is so true - even today. Oh wait, someone might state, "but there are frameworks you can simply integrate and they handle that kind of stuff for you, or at least make it easier"...To which I reply, do i really have to include ~500K - 1MB of some framework for this!?! Just silly that centering is an annoying task nowadays.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#28

Post by news_to_me »

lj3 wrote: post #15

There's a huge separation between who designs the frontend and who implements the frontend. To date, none of the frontend editors are good enough to completely replace the need for a programmer to wire up actions. Even back in the Flash days, you needed an ActionScript programmer to make your webapp do anything meaningful. Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to…

> What I would really like are more robust layout APIs for both the browser and native apps.

This is what I love about CSS flexbox and grid. Flexbox completely changed how I approach layouts, and I'm excited for grid to hit the big time as well.

The only thing I wish flexbox could do is allow custom spacing functions, so I could write my own alternative to "justify-content: space-around".

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#29

Post by startupdiscuss »

Good question.

One way to think about this is: why don't you or I use a GUI to build a front end.

I tried to use one for Bootstrap, and it was hard to get the everything to line up right. I wasn't sure how things would act when the screen changed, or how to change that.

Then when I went into the CSS it was laid out in an unfamiliar fashion.

These problems seem very solvable, but I don't know why they persist.

Re: Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?

#30

Post by jasondc »

news_to_me wrote: post #28
lj3 wrote: post #15

There's a huge separation between who designs the frontend and who implements the frontend. To date, none of the frontend editors are good enough to completely replace the need for a programmer to wire up actions. Even back in the Flash days, you needed an ActionScript programmer to make your webapp do anything meaningful. Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to…

> What I would really like are more robust layout APIs for both the browser and native apps. This is what I love about CSS flexbox and grid. Flexbox completely changed how I approach layouts, and I'm excited for grid to hit the big time as well. The only thing I wish flexbox could do is allow custom spacing functions, so I could write my own alternative to "justify-content: space-around".

Here is the best visual approach ive seen to designing flexbox layouts: http://flexboxgame.com
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