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

#1

Post by beaconstudios » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

WYSIWYG/GUI frontend editors have been around for years now, but the standard development process for frontend developers is still to crack out an IDE or text editor and write HTML/CSS by hand. For such a technical industry this seems like a strange trend - why wouldn't we leverage tools and technology to make building HTML/CSS less of a boilerplate activity?

It makes sense that it could be related to the widgetisation of frontends, with chunks of HTML appearing in different locations or as embedded JSX, but I see no reason why editors couldn't provide integration by allowing single documents to be sliced up into smaller components and kept in sync.

So, HN, what's your take on the lack of adoption of GUIs for building frontends?

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

#2

Post by minimaxir » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

GUI editors worked because website content was 100% static back then. In 2017, dynamic templating/MVC paradigms, along with CSS3 shenanigans, make GUIs difficult and certainly not accessible for non-technical users which would be the primary market.

That said, I've seen React GUI editors pop up occasionally.

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

#3

Post by beaconstudios » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:43 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #2

GUI editors worked because website content was 100% static back then. In 2017, dynamic templating/MVC paradigms, along with CSS3 shenanigans, make GUIs difficult and certainly not accessible for non-technical users which would be the primary market. That said, I've seen React GUI editors pop up occasionally.

the "pop up occasionally" part is what has me stumped - if these tools are any good, they must surely be more efficient than hammering out CSS and HTML (or pre-processor languages) by hand. If they aren't, then why, and if they are, what's holding back adoption? I'm a frontend developer myself and the reason I posted the question is because I couldn't give myself a good answer as to why I wasn't using one myself.

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

#4

Post by fusiongyro » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

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 generator, there were lots of ways to destroy the layout if the content you inserted into it was the wrong size or had the wrong stuff inside it, and it was hell for web scrapers and screen readers. The generated page had no semantics and tripped up all these secondary uses. It also tended to be huge, slow to load, and hard to edit later.

Once CSS grew more powerful, a big fight ensued for semantic markup: keeping the template semantically meaningful (no tables of images and lack of table content), easy to generate and fill and easy for scrapers and screen readers, and doing all the layout in CSS. The mantra became something about hand-coded HTML always being better than machine-generated.

It probably could be done better today (and with the prevalence of JSON APIs semantic markup may not matter as much as it used to), but once the philosophy becomes widespread it becomes difficult to unseat. When you have developers who are competent at CSS and semantic markup, the sales pitch of moving back to a visual editor becomes harder.

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

#5

Post by increment_i » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:52 PM UTC

I've found I really enjoy using webflow (a YC alumnus I believe) for responsive front end design. I literally design all my templates and components in their app now, export the raw HTML/CSS, and add any templating or client logic if needed. It's fun as hell. I also find looking at the generated CSS files helps me internalize CSS stuff I wouldn't otherwise have time to dig into. I know some folks look at me aghast for not hand coding my front end and I couldn't honestly care less.

I don't think it would work for everyone or every app, but for me it's been a dream come true.

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

#6

Post by beaconstudios » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

I remember dreamweaver, and I have the mental scars to show from using it. However, dreamweaver came about in the time of table-based layout and refused to adapt when the market consensus moved to div- (and later semantic element-) based layouts.

There's no reason that I can see, that you wouldn't be able to name the elements in a document (or ML could be perhaps used to auto-derive names), and beyond that, my understanding is that semantic markup (at least in terms of class/ID names) hasn't proven to be all that important since the advent of the API. Perhaps it's just not been done well enough so far to justify moving over from HTML/CSS, but you'd expect people to be jumping to solve their own issues. I for one find CSS/HTML tweaking to be pretty monotonous when I'm just trying to get to an end result.

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

#7

Post by jordanwallwork » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #3

minimaxir wrote: post #2

GUI editors worked because website content was 100% static back then. In 2017, dynamic templating/MVC paradigms, along with CSS3 shenanigans, make GUIs difficult and certainly not accessible for non-technical users which would be the primary market. That said, I've seen React GUI editors pop up occasionally.

the "pop up occasionally" part is what has me stumped - if these tools are any good, they must surely be more efficient than hammering out CSS and HTML (or pre-processor languages) by hand. If they aren't, then why, and if they are, what's holding back adoption? I'm a frontend developer myself and the reason I posted the question is because I couldn't give myself a good answer as to why I wasn't using one myself.

I often think react seems like the perfect use case for a graphical tool - you could write all the components yourself, so have total confidence in the markup, and just assemble them and add events etc through the gui

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

#8

Post by beaconstudios » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

increment_i wrote: post #5

I've found I really enjoy using webflow (a YC alumnus I believe) for responsive front end design. I literally design all my templates and components in their app now, export the raw HTML/CSS, and add any templating or client logic if needed. It's fun as hell. I also find looking at the generated CSS files helps me internalize CSS stuff I wouldn't otherwise have time to dig into. I know some folks look at me aghast fo…

intriguing - and how are you finding webflow? Is it just HTML+CSS rearranged in GUI form, or does it take away some of the more boilerplate-y aspects (clearfixes, polyfills, grid layouts etc)?

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

#9

Post by robin_reala » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #3

minimaxir wrote: post #2

GUI editors worked because website content was 100% static back then. In 2017, dynamic templating/MVC paradigms, along with CSS3 shenanigans, make GUIs difficult and certainly not accessible for non-technical users which would be the primary market. That said, I've seen React GUI editors pop up occasionally.

the "pop up occasionally" part is what has me stumped - if these tools are any good, they must surely be more efficient than hammering out CSS and HTML (or pre-processor languages) by hand. If they aren't, then why, and if they are, what's holding back adoption? I'm a frontend developer myself and the reason I posted the question is because I couldn't give myself a good answer as to why I wasn't using one myself.

Because front-end development isn’t visual development, it’s interface development.

What you’re building can be accessed visually on a variety of screen sizes, through a screen reader, a screen magnifier, a braille display, through print outs and a multitude of other different ways.

Conversely in the other direction, you’re also building application interfaces that let back-end systems feed data into the interface, and that‘s not something you’d want to use a visual editor for either.

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

#10

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

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.