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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?

#101

Post by alkonaut »

fiveseven_ wrote: post #76
namuol wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%); }

It's like a magic spell that makes very little sense and is impossible to guess.

If I fire up a reasonable layout system (Xaml for example) which is completely foreign, it's trivial to do there.

I can't understand why html/CSS makes it so hard.

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

#102

Post by tigershark »

My point of view as a WPF developer is that I permanently switched the xaml files to be opened with the plain xml editor rather than with the normal design view. If I need to design something really specific, in the very unlikely case that I don't do it with Inkscape, I use expression blend just to iterate quickly over that very specific graphical element. For all the rest I just write xaml. There is auto-completion, most of the time I don't even need it, and if I had to use the designer view to compose my guis I would spend much more time for nothing. And after that I had to manually edit the awful design that is spit out by The wysiwyg editor. So I really can't imagine myself now using one gui editor as I have done multiple times in the past.

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

#103

Post by ccleve »

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.

Completely agree. I wrote code in Delphi 20 years ago, and I was far more productive than I am today.

The secret was to have self-contained components that fit within a rigid layout system. It wasn't easy to make things pretty, but it worked. To write code, you clicked on the component, clicked on an event, and wrote your logic in a little snippet editor. It was all event-driven.

Would love to have something like that for web design today. An opinionated system that forced you to use a limited subset of html and css might be able to pull it off.

(Delphi was a VB-like environment for Borland Pascal. It's still around: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi)

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

#105

Post by Jach »

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…

I wish more tools let me define constraints. Flexbox helps to brute force the layout you want, but it's still pretty annoying. Something like http://gridstylesheets.org/ is a good example of what I want to use more of the time.

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

#106

Post by therealmarv »

ccleve wrote: post #103
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.

Completely agree. I wrote code in Delphi 20 years ago, and I was far more productive than I am today. The secret was to have self-contained components that fit within a rigid layout system. It wasn't easy to make things pretty, but it worked. To write code, you clicked on the component, clicked on an event, and wrote your logic in a little snippet editor. It was all event-driven. Would love to have something like tha…

Delphi is also the first thing which comes into my mind when I think of that. I was also much more productive in that old days with GUI stuff. I also don't understand why there is no good RAD existing nowadays... I think the biggest reason is because there are no real solid non changing standards (like the Windows API and VCL in Delphi) and all this stuff HTML5+CSS3+ES6 have much more possibilities how stuff is created and interlinked to eachother in comparison to a Windows window system.

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

#107

Post by redindian75 »

meredydd wrote: post #17

My take, as someone who sells a visual web-app creator (see my profile): If you want it to work well, the UI model of a visual editor has to match up with the data model of the application behind it. Visual Basic worked so well because the objects you manipulated in code were the same components you dragged and dropped onto your window. We already have way too many (and too complex) representations of application sta…

How can u skip HTML/JS stack for websites? Is your editor only for apps?

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

#108

Post by jonshariat »

I have been thinking the same thing for a while now. I know exactly what vision youre getting at. I think most people, especially programmers, don't see it.

The closest thing right now I've seen is Webflow and its CMS. You could create a lot of basic web apps with it.

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

#109

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

HTML isn't WYSIWYG. Every 'front end html GUI editor' I've seen has tried its best to sweep that fact under the carpet rather than embrace it.

HTML is very easy to edit, in fact, if you need precise results, it's easier to edit html by hand than it is to wrestle with a WYSIWYG editor, trying to get it to do what you want.

CSS really doesn't suit itself to our current understanding of GUI editors. It's not even clear how editing specificity of a selector, to take just one example, should work in a WYSIWYG environment.

We haven't got good visual editors for html/CSS for many of the same reasons that we don't have good visual editors for C.

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

#110

Post by Postosuchus »

intrasight wrote: post #25

The software industry largely decided to use HTML for the front end, it also largely gave up the 20 years of R&D on GUI design tools for existing semantically rich front-end frameworks. If Motif were FOSS or if CMU hadn't handed license rights to Andrew WM to IBM, we'd have probably avoided this whole mess that is HTML.

Motif, seriously?! A crap-ass, practically committee-built framework that tried to mimic Windows UX without investing in any real UX?! With all the glory of writing hundreds of LOC to achieve small things, casting things into generic Xt pointers, debugging segfaults caused by occasional wrong structure cast etc etc.

HTML stressed rapid results and quick iteration. Surely, it bought many other idiosyncrasies to the table but proposing Motif as HTML killer... In this case we should also declare CORBA a hypothetically better alternative to SOAP and WSDL...

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