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Comment by maaaaattttt | Hacker News Reader

I have kind of the same opinion. Maybe more provocative. When people show me figma to HTML with AI I tell them “have you ever heard of Dreamweaver?”

Ok, dreamweaver code was ugly and unusable when AI generated code is not too bad (sometimes). But still, I also feel we kinda were already close to where we’re at today.

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Not sure about Dreamweaver, but the fact that no Frontpage equivalent exists this day and age, and armies of developers are grappling with HTML, React and GraphQL (e.g. Gatsby) to generate what are essentially websites, is very surprising.

Of course it exists, it’s just not produced by Microsoft and therefore relatively few people use it.

Webflow has been around for a while and I’m sure they implemented AI already (I didn’t even check). Other React-based tools surely also exist, but have an even smaller user base.

There are countless of no-code tools to build landing pages, static site content.

For web apps the level of custom logic makes it unavoible to just code. Since web developers tend to be coders they would code static sites too. And use what they are most comfortable with, usually React.

My friend works on a low code system marketed to small governments. (Basically just CRUD builder optimized for bureaucracy.) There's definitely a niche for it, it just hasn't caught on much for some reason.

I'd like to talk about today's sponsor, Squarespace.

(in Jest, I know it doesn't solve every problem!)

I used to look down on it but when I heard it handles payment it blew my mind and I decided I'd rather use it myself if I ever make a shop instead of building it myself. To quote a random guy "I trust their code more than what I wrote at 2am."

I am a SWE. When I needed a website for a small business I was running, I used squarespace too. If you just need a static public facing site it's absolutely great.

Same here. I used to scoff at their prices “I could do that for way cheaper”, and I could/can… if my time is worthless which it’s not.

Now for things that aren’t my core business (day job or side project) I’m much more likely to reach for a paid off-the-shelf solution.

After months of putting off building a marketing website for my side project I just paid for a tool to build/host it so all I had to do was plug in my info. Yes I could have hosted it for pennies on S3 with CloudFront in front of it but instead I setup a cname, paid like $20 for the year, and let this other company handle the responsive design (template) for me.

For some weird reason, "Squarespace" keeps reminding me of a location-based social network from the early 2000's. Did I imagine that? Or did the domain and trademark get bought?

You might be thinking of “Foursquare” :)

Thank you! That's the one.

That's because things that were made with Frontpage back in the day are not made in HTML/React/GraphQL today.

They're made with Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.

I used Dreamweaver significantly back in the day, and use Figma professionally today. I see what you're saying, but there's no question about them being equivalent in functionality, except insofar as I do not consider generated code from either of them particularly useful. In that respect they are the same, but in every other way Figma is 100 times better.

Completely agree. Was trying to find the current parallel of the design to code process. But there is no doubt dreamweaver is almost not comparable to Figma (at least the version I knew).

As others mentioned the closest descendant of dreamweaver today is most likely Webflow.

I hadn't seen that comparison, but Webflow is really cool! I had to make a company website using it a few years ago, because it needed to be maintained by people with no coding skill at all. I found it really awesome. Also, their Youtube tutorials were about the most impressive tutorials I've ever seen, so well produced and fun that I would recommend just watching them as entertainment.

Are you sure? I remember one of Dreamweaver competitive advantages was that it produced much cleaner HTML than it's competitors. FrontPage was the big offender with awful code.

Toward the end of its life, Dreamweaver's code was quite readable. Webflow today is kind of an equivalent, and also puts out relatively readable HTML. I think most of the reputation comes from people looking at its early output.

I’d say nobody who “hand crafts” code finds any generated code readable. AI almost puts a dent in that, but even that often produces really ugly code.

People also produce really ugly code.

That's why any good company has code review rules and required linters and push restrictions, etc.

I once spent a week as an intern building a really clean and well done java swing UI options panel for a portion of our team's app. I was so proud of myself and thought it was so clear and concise and great. I told my manager it was all finished.

Well, no one else on the team was that familiar with java swing so they couldn't work with it, so one of my coworkers had to spend an hour rebuilding the panel in the UI builder that the rest of the app worked in. It produced a perfectly functional UI that had all the features requested and could be maintained by anyone on the team. Sure, the raw java file was twice as long, but who cares? It gets compiled.

I was enlightened on that day. "Elegant" is worthless in most cases. Five years later that entire app was rebuilt as a web app and nobody gave a shit whether one of it's option panels was artisanally hand crafted with care and love or spit out by an actually really good and regularized UI builder.

We are data plumbers. Nobody cares if the pipes you laid out are arranged to look like the mona lisa, and it's probably worse for the customer and maintenance that way anyway.

To be honest I can’t remember when was the last time I used dreamweaver but it sure wasn’t towards the end of its life. So, it could very well be that it got better after my last experience. What I remember was way too many tags and almost unreadable classes or repeated styles. It was not possible to directly take over without quite some re-writing.

We're so close! Now we just need to reinvent Flash and life will be complete again.

Inb4 wasm with native extensions

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