DEV Community

Discussion on: No more HTML coding, please. Let's make layout to HTML real

Collapse
 
cdsaenz profile image
Charly S.

Excellent article. this is indeed the elephant in the room in Web development. I come from such a world like Delphi, where you have the nice WYSIWYG designer and built forms and such and integrate with code. Times did change and all that became obsolete; it all became modular and open, and it's great, but also very time consuming. You mention one tool i love, Bootstrap Studio, I bought it and use it, but yeah the problem is when you GET BACK to make changes. For my PHP/JS dynamic sites you create a "template" and then you can't get back. My partner in development is a designer, he'll use Mobirise or similar, and once he sends me the template we can only fix it by hand, since i've embedded the template/dynamic elements into it.

Collapse
 
pashaigood profile image
Pavel

Charly, a very accurate metaphor!
Right, almost no one sees the elephant in the room.
As I recall, Bootstrap Studio is one of the first solutions of the "new wave" of HTML WYSIWYG-editor.
I didn’t like the way they solve the drag&drop problem. Sometimes it’s very annoying :). I think industry can do it better.

Collapse
 
cdsaenz profile image
Charly S.

I think it can definitely do better! I learned quite a few things from their produced code though (which is surprisingly clean in general). The problem in general is standardization; the editor builds its premise by being tied to Bootstrap (which I love but sometimes you might change libraries). The general open nature of HTML/CSS/JS coding (and even worse when you include PHP) makes it really complicated to build a drag & drop solution to cover all/most cases. But I think it can be done, specially if the big ones pay attention (Microsoft!)