Comment by michaelpinto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelpinto | Hacker News Reader

The only way in the real world to kill to PSDs is to have an easy-to-use WYSIWYG web design tool which would allow designers (and the non-technical) to eliminate HTML production pros. This has existed for desktop publishing since the 80s when programs like PageMaker eliminated the need for designers to work with phototypesetters who entered everything by hand.

I suspect the reason that this hasn't happen is because HTML has always been an evolving standard. So while you can use your copy of Quark from ten years ago today, you wouldn't be advised to do that with a ten year old copy of Dreamweaver if you want to make an HTML5 site.

Another reason Photoshop comps exist is because of clients who can't comprehend the abstract. As someone who does IA I can tell you that time I've had many clients (who are very intelligent) who just can't go from the abstraction of quickly done wireframes that show navigation to what the final site will be. So until you have clients like that (and maybe they're a generation away) you'll need Photoshop to what that final site will look like. And I say that knowing that Photoshop is really a hack given what the sites can do.

We've had WYSIWYG web editors for years. It's just another tool for someone who doesn't know what they're doing to create something they don't understand how it works. This is fine for people who have a specific need but for others it is not a solution.

Why couldn't you make an HTML5 site with a ten-year-old copy of Dreamweaver? Sure you won't get fancy stuff like code highlighting and suggestions but you could make a HTML5 site with notepad if one really wanted to.

I agree about the clients angle. Clients want to see the images of what the end of the project will look like. Until that changes, mockups will always be with us.

10 year old dreamweaver won't know about CSS3 or anything like that and will produce code with nested tables and whatnot that is optimized for IE6.

Sure, you could just use it as a text editor but at that point there are better editors you could choose.

Well, I was referring to the text editor and not the WYSIWYG editor since that'll likely create bloated code no matter how recent the version. I didn't dispute that there are better choices, it's just that it could be done if one wanted to.

I think the OP meant the Dreamweaver WYSIWYG as that would allow less technical designers to produce websites without knowledge of HTML/CSS.

And I don't believe I disputed that.

There wasn't even one decent WYSIWG html editor ever. Either they keep close to html which is horrible because html model is pure crap from design perspective. Those editors end up being text editors that type some texts for you when you click the button. The other kind of html editors are just fancy wizards that allow you to generate some limited outcomes that are easy on the eyes but they severly lack versatility.

I think I said all that in a much shorter amount of text.

Instead of designers being dependent on WYSIWYG, let them learn HTML/CSS. It's not hard, and is a valuable skill to have.

Raw HTML/CSS is god awful - especially HTML, which has to be about the most unfriendly possible syntax to type out on a keyboard.

Currently I'm loving Jade/Stylus to implement a fairly static website design, and that's just building it with a simple script (with Live.JS to preview changes).

So your complaint about HTML is simply about typing it? You've piqued my curiosity, what's so horrible about the syntax in that you dislike typing it?

This is about to turn into an argument about why designers need to learn vim.

That, hmmm, that actually sounds like fun.

Closing tags are unnecessary and annoying. Also it is much more verbose than it needs to be. Hence jade, haml, etc

Then how do you inform the browser where a span ends when it is enclosed by text inside a div?

A quick look at HAML and I fail to see how one is more or less verbose than the other. Of course, since I don't use it I suppose I'm not a valid source of comparison.

But to risk negativity, this sounds a great deal like the no semi-colons in Javascript thing a while back.

A tag could be closed without repeating it's name. It's obvious from the DOM which tag is being closed. It's the job of code editors to help you out by matching start/close tags - not the job of the language.

By the way - no semi-colons in javascript was a good idea aside from a few major factor - it broke things and it was a hack based on loose syntax handling. If it was built into the language design then it would have been a good thing.

But closing a tag with its name makes it clear to the person writing the code what's being closed. Think of a div that contains, say, a hundred lines of HTML. There's a habit with some people to insert a comment at the closing div to identify which div is being closed by referring to its id.

What you propose is trivial to the machine, but not necessarily easier for the human.

By the simple fact that no semi-colons broke things and was a hack contradicts the thought that it was a good idea. Building it into the language might be a good idea but it wasn't to try to go around the language.

This is old, old territory. HTML's least offense is its syntax. XorNot just doesn't have the vocabulary (or desire) to rehash a settled debate.

Just to save some time, HTML+CSS+JS fuses, poorly:

1) page description / layout

2) appearance

3) interaction / animation

4) forms

5) content

6) metadata / markup

7) typography

8) vector art and raster images

You could probably throw in HTTP stuff, cookies, how much the DOM sucks, and multimedia too.

Sadly, bad as HTML is, there hasn't been anything better.

But you are clearly covering topics that XorNot did not mention. He specifically stated disliking the syntax and having to type it.

I would agree with you that over the years people have pushed features into HTML beyond what it was originally intended for, but that's not what's being discussed.

Simply put: <p>some text</p> involves more awkward use of the right-side of my keyboard then there's any need for it to.

Contrast to Jade where I would just go: p some text

and let the indentation sort out the DOM structure. It's simple, readable, and doesn't overuse a set of keys placed more or less to be used infrequently (the <> brackets). All this translates to more productivity.

CSS is different problems, but it still stems from being overly verbose (too many vendor tags to worry about) and lacking useful functions, interators etc. Basically CSS sans a preprocessor is just slow and clumsy to work in.

Yes it's easy to learn the basics of HTML/CSS, but to do it really well (i.e. on a professional level) really requires an investment of time. From a financial point of view I'm not even sure that it's time well spent given that you can always outsource the work cheaply on the low end.

Spending time designing in photoshop and then "cheaply" "outsourcing" HTML and CSS development, aka your _actual_ website, is a terrible idea. There are people who implement designs well, and they are worthwhile to hire if you don't know browsers; they're certainly not cheap.

It depends on what you're doing. Yes if you're doing a large scale project that's mission critical you want a front end pro and wouldn't dream of going cheap. But on the other hand say you have to do a single simple landing page for a one time marketing campaign it would be silly to bring in the best.

Also as a designer I find myself telling potential clients that they don't need a designer and should just go with a template or a logo from 99designs. For the longest time I hated doing this, but I realized that if someone wants to spend from $10 to $500 to do something that I wasn't the right person for the gig!

It's only easy when you use one browser.

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