Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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There's a good reason for that - clean HTML is not just the territory of pedantic/obsessive designers, it has tangible and important benefits to many sites (note: many, not all).

Sure, if you want a personal homepage, or put up an ode to your dog Scruffy on the internet, tools like this may very well work for you. But in those use cases, we've already had capable tools for years, many of which produce cleaner code than this.

For anything bigger/more professional, dirty/bloated HTML/CSS means a few things:

- Bigger downloads for your visitors, wasting their bandwidth. But whatever, you're not paying for that, right?

- More data transfer for you and your host. That you do pay for.

- Increased latency (sometimes massively) and decreased accessibility for people with slower connections. Given the awesomeness of American broadband performance, that means most of your customers/visitors. More latency = more bounces = fewer visitors buying stuff from you, reading your ad copy, etc etc.

- Increased rendering times. See: bounce rate.

And these aren't negligible effects. The difference between a 10KB and 100KB file is very significant, and you don't need millions of uniques a month to find out the difference.

Dirty EPS files are not the same thing - because unclean PostScript suffers from none of these deficiencies except bigger downloads - which for EPS files has little to no consequence in the typical use case.

And then, on top of all these fine points, you'll get into trouble when you want to do something outside of what the tool provides. Then you need to touch the code, which is a horrible mess; with code this bad you'll want to kill yourself.

Just like PNG output from Photoshop, soon HTML+CSS output from design applications will beat most humans, or at least be reasonably close so that this complaint doesn't apply any more. It's not very hard to do a lot better than the source code of this web site.

Will Google design their homepage with Muse? No, they want to hand optimize it. Will people design websites for small businesses that get accessed a handful of times per day with something like Muse, when its output gets better? Yes. It might not make nerd-sense, but for a lot of sites it does make business-sense to have an increased page size in return for saving a lot of design and development time. Think of it this way: of all the things a person designing a website for a small company might spend their time on, is reducing page size the most profit increasing activity?

That's a good analogy, because until recently, I was writing all my PNG files by hand.

PNG output from Photoshop is just as bad as Muse's HTML (PNG optimisers cut "Save for web" sizes in half).

PNG optimisers are still automated though. I think parent was referring to hand-tuning the parameters yourself.

For me, this is really about code generators in general. No need to center Adobe out here, as I can't think of a single IDE that doesn't generate all kinds of extra code that, to me, is useless 90% of the time.

You also should keep in mind that Muse is a beta and the Muse site itself was actually written with Muse.

In this case, I think Adobe deserves the benefit of the doubt. They're trying to showcase this product with hopes that people like us will come to the table and give constructive feedback rather than point to the past and say, "See, I told you! Damn Adobe!".

If you don't think this is constructive criticism, don't ever build a product in a space largely influenced by engineers. You need thick skin to be a PM and get feedback from engineers.

Adobe could be learning a ton about their product from this response. If they say to themselves, "Those Developers just want to say, 'See, I told you! damn Adobe!'", they will have wasted a major opportunity to better their product.

Their target market is obviously not developers, and there is a lot of feedback here i would just chuck as interesting but meaningless to the product. There is some, though, that will directly impact whether an engineer will laugh when his non-tech friend asks about Muse or shrugs and says "It's not perfect, but if your needs are light, it'll work" (just like I was telling my father-in-law Dreamweaver would work for the genealogy stories cd he wants to make for the family).

Adobe needs to get the product to the second place.

There are worse things than the technical ones if you write bad HTML. Just two keywords: - accessibility / barrier-free - search engine optimization

Also: clean HTML enables hackability.

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