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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

> it was much as easier to change the web page over time when it was written in code than changing the auto-generated garbage HTML that front page produced. No code stood up poorly over time back then and I doubt it will today

You're in for a rude awakening then!

Webflow (the modern equivalent of Frontpage/dreamweaver) produces portable, semantic HTML and sane CSS. Like half of all YC companies are using it to build their marketing sites now.

I've found it's much faster to completely redesign your site over time with Webflow than with some custom built static site. In fact, I'd say things have flipped. I think whatever esoteric Node Package Mess, shit hot CSS framework and clunky headless CMS you're using today will be the thing that ages poorly over time.

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Your response almost proves my point. All those YC companies are super young, and are incentived to go into technical debt in the interest of first becoming profitable. They do all sorts of things the industry has decided are bad ideas in general, in the important (but short lived) interest of speed. They are in the experimentation phase, trying to figure out what will work long term while also not being held back by history with a working product.

Matlab SimuLink is a no code solution that works well. It does so because its users, mostly academics, fit a similar profile to YC startups: both are in the business of making stuff that doesn't need to last long/"writing throwaway code". In both cases, experimentation is important. After all, the YC startups don't know what is profitable yet.

Once profitable, they will want to make much more minor changes. After all, why change something that makes money?

It is this field of fine grained changes where code thrives.

I'll be convinced of no code when banks start using it.

I don't know whether that has changed, but in an old startup I worked at(20 years ago) a tool similar to simulink was used to simulate a wireless chip design over it's development life, a few years.

And in simulation you try/change things often.

It seems to work well.

There, change happen over the many system parameters, small blocks(some written in code), or maybe adding a new block(but those systems are dataflow like, and without that many unique blocks, so it's the right abstraction)

> Webflow (the modern equivalent of Frontpage/dreamweaver) produces portable, semantic HTML and sane CSS.

That’s assuming you already know how to use HTML and CSS. The tool does not help you learn that. I worked on a project in Webflow with talented designers who didn't know diddly squat about HTML and CSS, and it was a mess. I agree that it’s amazing that the tool allowed them to do anything at all, but the output was a big ball of tech debt.

No code isn't going to fix bad project management and organization skills.

I'd say 90% of the companies I've worked at who built their sites "from scratch" also had complex messes of duplicate/unused CSS styles and non-semantic HTML elements.

All this built in by so-called "professional" front-end developers!

That’s not really the problem we ran into. It was more a problem of layouts that broke completely as things were resized. I.e. they looked good with specific content and at specific sizes, but broke as soon as the text was edited or the page was resized.

You're probably right that the code Webflow produces is decent for maintainability, but the Webflow website (made in Webflow) does not inspire confidence. At 100% zoom on Firefox/MacOS, content does not actually fit the entire width of the page. Even the headers don't stretch from edge to edge, leaving white bars on the side of most pages. Maybe this is what they intended, but it makes it look like the CSS is broken.

it's intended

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