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Comment by jcoby | Hacker News Reader

you've hit on why html (or css or javascript) generators will never catch on. they do not fit within the traditional workflow.

you cannot take a delivered html document and convert it into whatever html-generator you use. the designer will have no clue how to use your (hand) converted file in dreamweaver to make small changes. in the end, it just makes life harder for everyone and costs more money.

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Your argument assumes workflows never change. If that were true, we would still be using whatever workflows our forebears used for every task. Since that is clearly untrue, workflows must be able to change.

However, given that business are formed to turn a profit, the standard workflow will remain unchanged until it is profitable to do otherwise.

If a markup-generating DSL was simple enough for designers to pick up quickly, it would make good business sense to push them through the transition.

> If a markup-generating DSL was simple enough for designers to pick up quickly, it would make good business sense to push them through the transition.

Designers being able to do it isn't the problem, justifying why designers should need to is the problem.

Ah, I was making a couple of assumptions:

  any DSL which generates markup must be more concise than the markup itself

Otherwise, there will have been no point in creating the DSL. This assumption is probably fair. An example of this would be Seaside's HTML generation DSL.

  a more concise language will be better in the long run

This assumption is flawed and doesn't take the designers' tools into account. A DSL would need its own tools before it became a valuable long-term investment.

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