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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?

#31

Post by karmelapple »

wvenable wrote: post #24

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.

If there was a text-based UI for Photoshop, I doubt it would be better at most things than how Photoshop works now, which involves direct manipulation of an image with essentially real time feedback of each action as you do it.

The OP is also talking about editing the visual side of things, and I think if a well-done editor that also output good CSS and HTML existed, it would be embraced by many.

Of course, I'm someone who enjoys using Xcode's interface builder tools to edit GUIs, rather than laying out controls in code, because I get instant feedback with Xcode's interface builder. As others have mentioned, something similar for Web work seems like it could be very powerful.

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

#32

Post by Animats »

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 styles, Javascript, and other junk. That's where page bloat comes from. See yesterday's article on why the web is so slow despite more bandwidth. Do "view source" on the pages of some major sites. It's disgusting.

There seems to be a programmer mindset that users must write source code which is then compiled to something else. Nroff/Troff, then TeX, then DocBook, for example. (Is DocBook dead? The last update on the DocBook site was three years ago.)[1] This is a terrible thing to impose on users.

[1] http://docbook.org/

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

#33

Post by timthelion »

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 create some sort of post template, that would then be able to be injected into the "body section" but really, all the interesting parts of the interface end up being dynamic, and the static parts are trivial to design in code too.

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

#34

Post by Animats »

mxuribe wrote: post #27
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 ann…

That was so easy with tables.

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

#36

Post by tyingq »

WYSIWYG seems to work well for HTML/CSS if you're working in a specific, fixed domain.

Wix.com, for example, does a nice job with this. If you play around with it, though, you can see why it would be difficult to extend it for general purpose use on any type of website. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgkkiKdPibg for an idea of how it works.

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

#37

Post by wvenable »

karmelapple wrote: post #31
wvenable wrote: post #24

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.

If there was a text-based UI for Photoshop, I doubt it would be better at most things than how Photoshop works now, which involves direct manipulation of an image with essentially real time feedback of each action as you do it. The OP is also talking about editing the visual side of things, and I think if a well-done editor that also output good CSS and HTML existed, it would be embraced by many. Of course, I'm someo…

There is no exclusively visual side of things for web design. Sure you do the initial design in Photoshop but once you need to add interactivity it's no longer purely visual. You've sliced it up and you can't put it back together.

Xcode works because even on mobile/desktop there is more separation between design and functionality than the web. The web is both more primitive and more flexible.

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

#38

Post by stonogo »

ericls wrote: post #16

What about UX? How you drag and drop that?

Same way you don't drag and drop conversations. UX isn't a product; it's a byproduct of UI. Good UI necessarily produces good UX, not the other way around, no matter what professional "UX engineers" post to Medium.

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

#39

Post by Eridrus »

fusiongyro wrote: post #22
Eridrus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have mentioned a few that already exist in this thread; I found another one called Avocode.

It seems like they do exist, and it's just that developers like myself are unaware of them.

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

#40

Post by mariusasdf »

I'm a designer, and consider HTML/CSS/JS to be as good a design tool as any, perhaps even better than any CAD app. I use Sketch, Illustrator and Photoshop as needed for icons, illustrations and photos.

Also, code is a really handy tool for design (generation/automation).

I believe in using the right tool for whatever "material" I'm working with. For (responsive) web apps, that tool is HTML/CSS/JS.

Most designer's have their own preferences. I don't believe any current or future wysiwyg app can meet all needs.

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