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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?

#71

Post by beaconstudios »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #29

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.

I'm actively looking into this idea at the moment, and would love to get some feedback from you along the way - I don't have much built right now but I'm happy to give you a discounted account and influence over the product direction if you'd be willing to give me feedback while I iterate? My email address is in my profile if you're interested :)

(this also applies to anyone else who thinks that GUI frontend editing is the way forward - send me an email and I'll let you know when I have something to show you! I won't send you anything else, scout's honour).

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

#72

Post by mattnewton »

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…

Screen readers do expect semantic markup, and it's possible to get by with aria-roles, but why?

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

#73

Post by beaconstudios »

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.

this is what's shocking to me - I will confess, I partly started this thread to investigate whether there was an opportunity to start a company around making web front-end development suck less. The fact that we hand-write the most fine-grained basic stuff in 2017 is odd for such a technical industry. Shoot me an email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to check it out when it's ready!

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

namuol wrote: post #57
mxuribe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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…

> To which I reply, do i really have to include ~500K - 1MB of some framework for this!?! What framework? .center-the-stuff { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; }

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by leepowers »

TylerE wrote: post #56
mxuribe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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…

Or you can use a table and get on with your life.

Or `display: table` and `display: table-cell` so you can use a `` instead of the dreaded `` tag.

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

#76

Post by fiveseven_ »

namuol wrote: post #57
mxuribe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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…

> To which I reply, do i really have to include ~500K - 1MB of some framework for this!?! What framework? .center-the-stuff { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; }

here's a non-flexbox solution, but the parent element has to have a set height:

  .parent {
    position: relative;
  }

  .child {
    position: absolute;
    top: 50%;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
  }

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

#77

Post by timthelion »

redindian75 wrote: post #68

Simple, job security. It would put lot of FrontEnd Coders out of work - not all, but many of them. So it is in everyone's best interest to keep coders coding, designers designing and have as little overlap as possible. Silos keeps the wheels turning. So there has been a collective badmouthing about how WYSIWYG tools create a codular mess, and then they proceed to create similar codular mess by hand (pull this library…

Do you realize, that guis, and gui designers have been around since before the internet? Do you realize that smart programmers working on their own dime don't use gui designers, not out of desire for job security, but for real technical reasons? Do you think that Richard Stallman and the GNU freaks don't use GUI designers out of desire for job security? That's an insane notion, given that many free software developers don't have traditional jobs by choice.

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

#78

Post by anigbrowl »

Most programmers are not very good at visual thinking IME. I have a bet with myself that by 2025 natural language processing will be good enough (combined with other UI tools) for designers to explain what they want directly to the computer and a great many programmers are going to be sitting around wondering what the hell happened.

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

#79

Post by jplatte »

Hm, it might have to do with the way CSS works.. When I'm developing gtk+ Applications, I always do the UI in glade. It works wonderfully, even if I still have to do some stuff in code (UI elements that are added in response to the user doing something). And even for that there seems to be an alternative, namely GtkBuilder templates – haven't tried that yet and Glade doesn't seem to be able to create them, but might be able to edit them once you have manually written the first few lines of XML.

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

#80

Post by moflome »

GFischer wrote: post #47

I've seen a few bootstrap-based ones and I have tried a few, like PineGrow and Bootply, and I think they help. I'm hoping for a React-friendly one. https://pinegrow.com/ http://www.bootply.com/ A list of some options: http://www.cssauthor.com/bootstrap-editors/

> React-friendly one...

How about Structor: https://helmetrex.com

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