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

Post by Animats » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 7:30 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #45

Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Post by nip » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

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…

Post by jrjarrett » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

jasoncrawford wrote: post #26

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. *…

Post by namuol » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

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…

    .center-the-stuff {
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      justify-content: center;
    }

Post by namuol » Fri, Feb 10, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

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".