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Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

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Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#131
post #130
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations. I think the framing here is unfair. It's not that the people innovating in JS or HTML think what they're doing is "revolutionary" or has never been done before. Generally they are applying ideas that have been developed elsewhere, but ar…

Let me give you two anecdotes. (1) Some time ago I'm at a coding interview and I'm tasked with an algorithm to calculate the biggest rectangle you can make of a set of segments. Or something similar. I'm presented with a computer, with VSCode, with an open file with some code already. I left my chair, approached the whiteboard available in the room and started thinking about how to address the problem. The interviewe…

I'm not sure what the relevant moral is here. It seems to be "don't misuse functional programming"?

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider "not fine" about websites written in "just" html, CSS, and js?

You can't reuse pieces of UI functionality (a bundle of specific html, css and js) unless did copypasta which is obviously awful. Sharing business logic across different areas of an application becomes much harder and you can't non-trivially write and run tests across areas of your application because you are just using html,css and js. And the big monster: state. Sharing state safely across different areas of an app…

Sure you can, Web Components exist now, and SSR components exist for 25 years across all main languages.

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I think it is very much "just fine", but people have requirements which make things too complicated. I find it way harder to work in a React app than a few .html and .js files. TypeScript's cool though.

Most people working professionally as web developers have limited ability to reduce the requirements and have to implement what their company ask for. At that point having something to manage the complexity is much better than not.

Yeah. I'd argue you should quit if you as dev have no say in the development, but what do I know

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of MS Frontpage for a very brief moment as I was clicking the link to Live Preview.

Pinegrow[1] is somewhat similar to MS Frontpage IIRC. I highly recommend it. [1] https://pinegrow.com/

Never heard of it, reminds me of DreamWeaver, instant favorite. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#136
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Rats nest of non-declarative JavaScript. 2) Rats nest of JavaScript callbacks. 3) Overlapping stylesheets with !important everywhere. 4) Elements used for style not their semantic purpose ( , ) 5) Subtle and not-so-subtle browser compatibility issues.

Also: using JS for things where HTML and CSS would have been sufficient, creating some of the issues above.

this ^ - and if js at all, then only using a subset which passes jslint.com without any errors or warnings. that the score of any site should be

100 100 100 100 1.1s max paint (mobile) 0ms block 0.0xx max shift A+ headers 0 errors and 0 contrast errors webaim goes without saying of course

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is useful. I am occasionally day dreaming about moving my static site from Hugo to pure html which I write/edit myself. Do these features depend on complexity of the html or that doesn't matter? Does Javascript work in live preview?

Why do you fantasise about writing pure html manually for an entire website? Haven't you done it before?

Because I don't understand the template language used by Hugo. The syntax is weird, using features is complicated. Everytime i thinking of changing something in my site, it feels like PTSD thinking about touching that code.

If it was just html, I could modify it easily. But doing big structural changes in many html files is as painful. Visual tools, like this one should help with that.

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#138
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used E4X, but it at least looks like it'd make XML more tolerable. Most XML experience I had was ejabberd and XMPP. Was thoroughly pissed off by the end of it. We ended up sending JSON over IQ messages instead because we were super done with XML, only to find that iOS's XML parser takes O(N^2) time to parse each element. Had to split the elements to make it work. 0/10 would not recommend.

haha, reminds me of the GTA parser drama :)

This? https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... LOL

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#139
post #17
post #16

This reminds me of Microsoft FrontPage more than 20 years ago.

Well now I have to try it. I used Frontpage for all of my web sites as a kid and I miss it a lot.

The html it spit out was horrendous, but it was a good gateway to web development.

Re: Show HN: A VSCode Extension to edit HTML visually in real-time

#140

Are we trying to reinvent web development? Last few years have been wild. We abandoned HTML CSS and JS websites that used to work just fine and ran after frontend component frameworks and now the circle is getting completed by building tools and extensions we had 20 yrs ago

I love this discussion -- it provides interesting perspective on the history, especially for me as a person who is learning web development.
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