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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Wow.. this has just about everything.

Why not take just the most important layout and design features and create a tool that can output actual web pages?

I'll tell you why. Because web developers code in CSS and HTML. If you can just export a web page, then it takes away their "programming" work.

If we took 1/100th of the effort used to create mockup tools, we could have 10 really great graphical interactive web page and even web application editors.

That stuff about "semantic" markup for SEO is bullshit.

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Have you ever built a webpage? There are many optimizations that simple software just isn't going to come through on.

Have you ever SEO'd a site? That is something that certainly takes semantics into account and does so in a way that affects every page and their relationships.

Interface design is a separate process entirely, and its focus should not always be constrained by the engineering it would take to actually code the interface.

If it would take so little effort to make such a software, it would certainly exist. The mockup tools out there are pretty primitive and also fairly limited in number. What you describe is certainly in the future, but to be truly good it will require some very sophisticated technology.

I've been building web pages and web applications for many years.

What optimizations do you think that software can't do that justifies hand coding CSS and HTML? Probably the first one is related to autosizing layouts.. but guess what, graphical editors CAN do that. Regardless, the majority of web pages today STILL are fixed width.

There are plenty of tools and platforms that demonstrate the concept of graphical UI and application editors. Less so in the web space but there are still several out there. Most are not very popular and are missing some important features like open extensibility.

I have studied SEO and done some of that. Let's get specific. What exactly do you think needs to be in the markup or relations between pages in order for Google to give you a fair representation?

Are you really trying to say that if the div class isn't "whysuperspam.com" or something that it won't get a good Google ranking?

Not saying that it goes back to semantic classes or anything like that, but if aligning alt tags, creating hierarchy with headings, being smart about the order of the code vs the order it appears- all those things are going to require 'coding'in a UI that is just as work intensive as coding them in the traditional sense.

You really think the hierarchy of the headings matters to Google?

I doubt that the order of the text matters either, but if it did you could create a tool that would order the output.

I know from years of optimization and measurement. Everything matters. Google/ Matt Cutts like to state otherwise, but SERPs prove otherwise.

It's made for a different purpose but scrollkit has the most critical layout/design features and the output is vanilla html/css:

http://www.scrollkit.com

Yeah I really like your application and you guys have inspired me to keep working on my system.. I think that it should be as easy as you make it to put text, images etc. on the page. I have been working on something similar but open source and more comprehensive which it has a bunch of other stuff like custom plugins, widgets and forms/blogs. Its taking a long time for me to finish because its so involved.

WYSIWYG is dead

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