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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?

#41

Post by timthelion »

timthelion wrote: post #33

The correct answer to this is that the structure of the interface changes over time, and is influenced by the code. If you were to try to implement, say, the interface to HN, then you would create a top bar with some links, a body section, and then a bottom bar with some links. But the interesting part, all the posts, couldn't be drawn in the gui editor, because, well, they are programically generated. You could crea…

Just to be clear, I say that this is the "correct" answer in order to differentiate my answer from the ones that I think are not actually correct.

I often think, and many agree, that the problem is with reactive interfaces supporting both mobile and desktop. Or that the problem is with GUI editors producing disgusting HTML. And indeed these are both problems. But QTDesigner, and friends don't face these problems. Your GTK app isn't going to be a reactive interface, and QT, not using html, isn't at risk of the "disgusting html" problem. And yet these designers aren't terribly popular either.

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

#42

Post by brandmeyer »

I agree with the other's regarding the dynamic nature of the content. In addition, the widgets themselves haven't changed all that much for desktop GUI's. WxWidgets, Win32, Gtk, and Qt have mostly the same basic set of controls today that they had 15 years ago. Just imagine the extra R&D churn it would consume if you also had to update your GUI editor every time you changed a web UI control!

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

#43

Post by praptak »

Same reason markup/markdown is better for docs than Microsoft Word.

WYSIWYG development just sucks. It's not diffable nor mergeable. Quick setup is simple, but complex refactorings are plain impossible. Also there's always at least this one thing the editor fights you on.

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

#45

Post by pjmlp »

Animats wrote: post #32
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…

No, we don't "expect (HTML) markup to have meaning". Browsers don't do anything with that semantic information. What we have are generators which use HTML/CSS as an output medium, like Postscript or PDF. Sites with HTML tables were faster to load, smaller, resized automatically, and never had overlapping text. Most of the claimed benefits of CSS were false. CSS pages tend to pull in, or include, large libraries of st…

> Is DocBook dead?

I was involved with a technical documentation project around 6 years ago, and the trend was moving to DITA.

http://dita.xml.org/

http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/dita_editor_structured_...

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

#48

Post by bsaul »

drabiega wrote: post #20

Visual editors work great when the thing will always look the way you've designed it. But that's not how the web works. Especially now that mobile web browsing is a common thing, your site will be viewed on all sorts of devices with different resolutions / aspect ratios / etc. When you add that factor in it shouldn't be hard to see why a visual editor is not sufficient. Visual editors are just not a great way to spec…

interface builder ( xcode ), does it well for iOS. You can preview you UI instantly for ipad / iphone in both portait and landscape.

i think the reason the equivalent doesn't exists for web is maybe due to the complexity of css / html, and the various level of browser support, which makes all of it a dark art as soon as you aim for wide device support. Whereas Apple controls everything.

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

#49

Post by GFischer »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #10

In terms of easily cranking out a CRUD app, the current state of the art in web front-end development is a long ways behind Visual Basic 4 which was released in 1995.

Seeing some other comments, I think we're very close to a VB-like solution (maybe something with React + a GUI).

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

#50

Post by Marazan »

timthelion wrote: post #33

The correct answer to this is that the structure of the interface changes over time, and is influenced by the code. If you were to try to implement, say, the interface to HN, then you would create a top bar with some links, a body section, and then a bottom bar with some links. But the interesting part, all the posts, couldn't be drawn in the gui editor, because, well, they are programically generated. You could crea…

Yup, the Adobe Flex GUI builder was lovely - right up until you got to the dyanmically generated content or custom components.
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