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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Front end design should have been all drag and drop years ago. LLMs should be doing it now. If it were not for the fact that HTML is a terrible way to encode a 2D layout, it would have been.

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It was drag and drop before we decided websites should work on different screen sizes. And that it should adapt to every size more elegantly than a word document randomly changing layout when things move.

Definitely a challenge, but many Windows 95 era apps also handled resizeable windows and screens that could be 16x resolution difference.

I often hear this, and to an extent I don't disagree. There is an absurd amount of complexity that goes behind CSS/JS/HTML to make it function how it does. Browsers are true monstrosities.

But what alternatives are really left behind here that you view as superior?

To me, it is obvious the entire world sees a very high value in how much power can be delivered in a tiny payload via networked JS powering an HTML/CSS app. Are there really other things that can be viewed as equally powerful to HTML which are also able to pack such an information dense punch?

> tiny payload

Er, no. Go watch some major site load.

Why the bad faith answer? Even a bloated, ad-ridden modern web bundle is tiny compared to native apps. And I'd be happy to hear about an interesting app delivery platform which makes 1s of MBs look absurdly large.

I think you and I both know a 200kB gzipped web app can be a very powerful tool, so I don't understand what angle you're approaching this from.

HTML is a good enough way of representing a superset of different layout types. It seems display: grid does most of the 2d constraint things that people always used to talk about. I don't know the state of the art for drag-drop grid layout builders, but it seems possible that one could be built.

I mostly agree. I think it isn't drag and drop because it's surprisingly hard to make a GUI builder interface that doesn't suck balls. Some manage it though, like QtCreator.

I guess there is stuff like SquareSpace. No idea how good it is though. And FrontPage back in the day but that sucked.

VB6. yeah it was battleship gray, but you could amazing things.

VB6 UIs are the color of getting work done. ;)

Amazing, unless you wanted to resize the window that is.

delphi had that sorted

Dude,you could easily resize. There was the MDI form as well. You could snap controls to a fixed width to the edge of the window. VB6 is hanging out in the cooldown tent while the rest of front end tech stack still has laps to go.

I know you could resize, but it didn't have layouts like Qt has, so the content of the window would not resize :D

My favorite in that regard was Interface Builder, though I must admit it's been so long since I wrote MacOSX software that I haven't had use for it in ages.

The ability to drop components in and then move the window around and have them respond as they will in the live program was peak WYSIWYG UI editing. I have not experienced better and I doubt I will.

The problem with drag drop frontend is the code generators that support that end up tightly coupling the document with the code, which doesn't lead to good testability and scalability. I'm optimistic that LLMs could accomplish a visual design paradigm while still designing the code in good taste, but so far I'm not holding my breath.

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