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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Having worked with Figmas from pure UI-designers that translation to HTML/CSS is not at all as straightforward as they like to pretend.

I don't know about this startup's product but based on their homepage having (real) HTML/CSS output as a core part of the creation process would have helped me many times. Designers need to be constrained.

Expecting designers to know how to build production websites in html/css/js before designing is apparently a step people skip over these days. It creates meaningless design and dev cycles + tons of extra approval meetings by marketing/execs.

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It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.

I guess one could create a really good tool where UI designers make a real web reusable pattern language, and UX designers specialize them into a set of templates the software developers can actually apply.

> It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.

Figma isn't a web app in the traditional sense of the word, it's a C++ app with a WebAssembly compile target. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

E.g., it's more similar to how Adobe Illustrator and other C++ graphics programs render content than it is how a web browser engine renders HTML and CSS.

That's an implementation details and doesn't answer the higher level product incongruency. Tool A, used to design for technology B, doesn't output files in technology B format. It's fine to point out that Tool a uses technology C under the hood, but that's the tail wagging the dog, and doesn't make sense, even if there's an explanation for it.

To address your point specifically though, Webflow is (at least from my perspective) the inevitable result of the line of thinking you're pursuing. So I'd be curious what you think of Figma vs. Webflow, and why those two products have their relative market positions.

I.e., "Tool A, used to design for technology B, doesn't output files in technology B format. [...] doesn't make much sense".

E.g., why not just use Webflow then? From my understanding, that's what it does, that's what it's made for.

Figma got where they are because their collaboration features are Google docs level. They also got enterprise buy-in, and target design more broadly than simply website building. (As far I understand. I'm not a professional designer.)

> Figma got where they are because their collaboration features are Google docs level.

I’d argue Figma got where they are mainly by streamlining the handoff process, not because of their live editing collaboration features per se. But there isn’t really an empirical way to validate this. But my point is really if you want to export natively to the web, just use, promote, etc... WebFlow that's the tool designed for that job.

> [Figma targets] design more broadly than simply website building.

This is absolutely true, but I’d argue it’s impossible to be able to both target many platforms, and simultaneously be able to export to all those platforms natively. I.e., you have to build the constraints of a specific platform into your tool in order to export to that format. This is what WebFlow is (and using it for just 5 minutes makes clear the trade-offs of designing a tool like that).

As you said, there's no empirical way to validate it, but however they did it, Figma is great, they won.

I think they could do more for exports in this day and age, but I'm not them.

Sure, but I was interpreting the parent comment as implying the underlying technology was important to the output format:

> people got in the trouble of making a web-app [...] and those designs are not plain web pages.

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