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Comment by echopom | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit fed up with those "IDE" for web attempts.

Every 9 Month or so , we get a new attempt at fixing Web Dev lack of Visual Feedback and productivity issues.

The typical coder behind this type of project get "Mental Fatigue/ Coder Exhaust" after 6 Months as they generally ignore the complexity behind building such product and end up abandoning the project....

There is a google graveyard , but we should also build an "Front IDE / Webviewer" graveyard.

The only one I recall without googling anything : Deco[0] and PreVue[1]

[0]https://www.decoide.org/ [1]https://github.com/open-source-labs/PreVue

HN could you complete my comment with others "Front IDE / Webwiever" that have been abandoned ?

Pretty sure there is more than a dozen.

View on HN

Do you also have concrete criticism of this project or just generic general complaints about the topic?

Yes, there are many attempts trying to fix the problem, that designing requires coding and yes, that is a very, very hard problem to do right.

But just shitting on something because you feel bitter about the topic (or whatever your motivation is) probably won't lead to anything interesting.

Well, is says that the website itself was build by the tool. Non-semantic tags, divs instead of links, buttons instead of links, a lot of inline styles (which is a bad practice), deep nesting. So inline styles will make caching css impossible, so high load times, not good for performance. Deep nesting makes the problem even worse. So the result is a slow bloated inaccessible code, but the result may look ok. If all you want is a pretty picture - than yeah, it is a great tool.

I prefer this approach - https://github.com/seek-oss/playroom Just create your components and add them to the sandbox and allow your designers to play with them.

Think he's point was that GUI products in this space is extremely difficult to get it right due to the explosion of edge cases and general complexity.

There have been other React IDEs in the past, and they've faded off into obscurity because of factors I am not familiar with but one in which parent's comment is alluding to, the hidden rise of technical debt for last mile problems and custom requirements.

Think we are dealing really with RAD vs traditional waterfall coding approaches. Both have ups and downs but the big drawdown is the stockholm syndrome effect that comes with relying on some other party for RAD.

Despite your negative tone, I think you have a point. There are many project like this. I'm working on another one at the moment and I have compiled a long list of similar projects. There is definitely a need for a tool that can create UIs visually. IMO such a tool needs to have interoperability with code, as in changes to the code reflect in the tool and changes in the tool make reflect back in the code.

We haven't succeeded in creating an intuitive and robust enough tool that accomplishes this, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. It's a technical challenge which can be overcome.

At face value this seems like it could apply to a bunch of different categories (e.g., another text editor, another todo list, another chat app, etc...)? Yes, most new software in every category fails, but every once in awhile one succeeds, and that's how we make progress. The failures along the way just seem like a necessary byproduct of progress.

>Yes, most new software in every category fails, but every once in awhile one succeeds, and that's how we make progress.

+100

Also, I'm rather uncomfortable when a "Show HN" gets dumped upon - furthermore with no actual specific criticism, let alone advice on how to improve.

What happened to that "Be kind. Don't be snarky." from the guidelines?

It was never my intention to be "shitting" on anyone.

Just a feeling of exasperation when seeing the product.

Someone in the comments confirmed what I said

Created an equivalent for bootstrap but abandoned it for the reasons I have written.

> Just a feeling of exasperation when seeing the product.

Well maybe you're not the target market then? It looks like a no-code rather than low-code effort, and I'm hazarding a guess that you're a dev and so ...

> It was never my intention to be "shitting" on anyone.

I'm sure that you didn't.

Here's the thing: this is a "Show HN" - somebody has been brave enough to show their new thing to the community. People vary - some are much more sensitive than average, particularly in a community like this that self-identifies as not-average, and will take the mildest criticism very personally.

If something's not for you, there's always the option of not commenting, or at least starting out by saying something encouraging to soften the blow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

It's not just fatigue. I also have such a project. It allows you to build using bootstrap, but with expressions, loops, conditions and a data store. It would be pretty easy to make a Vue version of it. It's a structural editor though, but it offers a graphical preview with limited interaction. But it's not good enough for the general public, and I'm not going to finish it, only to see the project linger somewhere in a obscure corner of the internet, or –worse- attract some attention and get a bunch of idiots making demands and threats.

I don't think the criticism is wrong.

Though it would seem that something in this space will eventually attract a decent user base.

I'm basing that thought off the idea that Dreamweaver and others were once useful to different groups.

Where exactly is now your problem with IDE's for webs?

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