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> and a distinct lack of tooling Great comment. I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as g

> and a distinct lack of tooling Great comment. I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money. Abstract away the browser incompatibility nonsense with the tools, provide the right kinds of editors and development environments, and lots of the complexity should be hidden away in the dev envrionment.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
"I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money." I very much agree. HTML/CSS tooling in general is very poor today. Even something as simple as creating a cross-browser compatible semantic html + css website in a designer is very much lacking today, a lot of hand crafting is still necessary to achieve even moderately good results (e.g. efficient/performance friendly coding, search friendliness, consistent behavior and appearance across all popular browsers, aesthetically appealing result). And that doesn't even begin to touch a lot of the complicated process problems that html/css designing faces. For example, it'd be nice to be able to code design at a higher level than css in a language that gave you compile time warnings and errors, integrated into a build system that spit out verbose, commented inline css (to avoid caching issues) for debug/testing builds and minified, external, versioned css for production builds. And that's just a tiny corner of the whole tooling issue. Today tooling for web design is perhaps at the level of software engineering tooling in the early 70s. When web dev tooling finally catches up a lot of things will change and almost certainly a lot of people will have made a lot of money in providing that tooling.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

"I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money." I very much agree. HTML/CSS tooling in general is very poor today. Even something as simple as creating a cross-browser compatible semantic html + css website in a designer is very much lacking today, a lot of hand crafting is still necessary to achieve even moderately good results (e.g. efficient/performance friendly coding, search friendliness, consistent behavior and appearance across all popular browsers, aesthetically appealing result). And that doesn't even begin to touch a lot of the complicated process problems that html/css designing faces. For example, it'd be nice to be able to code design at a higher level than css in a language that gave you compile time warnings and errors, integrated into a build system that spit out verbose, commented inline css (to avoid caching issues) for debug/testing builds and minified, external, versioned css for production builds. And that's just a tiny corner of the whole tooling issue. Today tooling for web design is perhaps at the level of software engineering tooling in the early 70s. When web dev tooling finally catches up a lot of things will change and almost certainly a lot of people will have made a lot of money in providing that tooling.