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Could any expert shed any information on why we lack a professional front-end WYSIWYG kind of editor for the web ? I remember tools like dreamweaver/frontpage e

by vcool07 10y ago

Could any expert shed any information on why we lack a professional front-end WYSIWYG kind of editor for the web ? I remember tools like dreamweaver/frontpage existed a long time ago, but don't hear about them anymore. Is it something that's too hard to make or is it just that the market doesn't exist ?

boxcardavin 10y ago
I'd also love an informed answer about this.
proyb2 10y ago
Namo Webeditor was popular along with many tools, only backend services need lot of effort to maintain. Thee is one professional web design editor who patented it.
devoply 10y ago
My thinking is that they were replaced by dynamic sites based on PHP like WordPress, which initially people were doing template conversions for but eventually they switched to using themes... then we have had a bit of a redux with static site generators, but those are all hobbyist efforts. Dreamweaver still exists, it's just that no one makes those sorts of sites on Dreamweaver any more. There is no market for it. All the developers that might do static frontends code by hand or use a library like Bootstrap or a theme like a WordPress theme. So there is not really much room for a tool like Dreamweaver in the landscape of web design. It's all about modifying existing things to make them fit the problem.
- OscarTheGrinch 10y ago
  Yeah, also being able to inspect live code in the browser drank dreamweaver's milkshake.
udkl 10y ago
There is https://pinegrow.com/ https://pinegrow.com/ & to some extent Adobe Muse .... but I agree with the sentiment of there not being more options of WYSIWYG editors to choose from.
- samuell 10y ago
  Ah, didn't know this one ... and even has a linux version, great. Thought macaw was the only option there (light app to be ran on wine), apart from adobe (which are getting too heavy, and thus way too problematic to run on wine).
caryhartline 10y ago
They do exist in different forms. If you're on the level that's just above making a Facebook page then you might go with Squarespace or Wix which have WYSIWYG editors. Surprisingly, Dreamweaver is still a product that is updated(?) and used by many. When it comes to the high-end, there are Mac apps such as Hype and Sparkle which are used especially for developers who want to create animated websites. It's also the case that creating a webpage isn't the most important thing anymore. Many businesses only exist on Etsy and Facebook. The time when knowing what html is and knowing how Dreamweaver works meant you could make a living off of anyone who wanted to be "on the Internet" is kinda over.
- JonathonW 10y ago
  Dreamweaver's still around (and just got a big update as part of the Adobe CC 2017 wave of apps), but Adobe seems to be positioning Muse more as the code-free WYSIWYG HTML editor now-- modern Dreamweaver's very code-focused.
maxmcd 10y ago
In my limited experience the market asking for and building sites on dreamweaver has completely shifted to squarespace, wix, etc.
intrasight 10y ago
The underlying JS and HTML5 frameworks change too quickly for that to work. Companies that tried have presumably lost their shirts. But I'd say that's a good thing in that now web development is a "fill the area under the demand curve" type of undertaking. You can spend between $10^1 and $10^7 on a web site.
pcr0 10y ago
A bunch of reasons, including lack of market, complexity of today's web. They aren't entirely gone though, this was posted to HN a while ago: https://preview.webflow.com/preview/flexbox-game?preview=d1a26b027c4803817087a91c651e321f&m=1 https://preview.webflow.com/preview/flexbox-game?preview=d1a... It's a game in their editor that teaches you flexbox.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Complexity? Web apps are often complex yes but web pages? Even the Webflow homepage/marketing pages look identical to every web site posted here. So the lack of market yes; people take a template/code and change the content. Not sure if web apps were ever a good fit for tools like this as that is more like a full IDE as it would need coding as well to make sense. At least allow to specify data structures as in and out for the components you are designing.
  - pcr0 10y ago
    Considering even web pages today though, it's not often I want to build everything from scratch using just HTML. Rather I want to be able to drag and drop bootstrap/foundation/material components, but since I can't I might as well just use a dumb editor and live-reload changes in my browser as WYISWYG isn't working for me anymore. And I agree, WYISWYG editors fall far behind IDEs and text editors when it comes to the code.
tribby 10y ago
> Could any expert shed any information on why we lack a professional front-end WYSIWYG kind of editor for the web ? we don't. webflow[0] is the best I've seen. there's an OSS clone called grapejs[1], but it's still very alpha. one reason we don't see greater adoption is that WYSIWYG editors for the web occupy a sort of middle ground between template-based hosts like squarespace, weebly, etc, and opinionated low-barrier-to-entry frameworks like bootstrap. I think there's some market, especially for prototyping, one-off marketing pages, and people who don't already have a preferred design workflow, but I don't think WYSIWYG will return in a large way until these editors begin doing "real" front-end lifting -- i.e., "drag and drop this react/vue/whatever component within a grid, without having to know what react/vue/whatever is." the appeal of dreamweaver, frontpage, and all of those editors in the 90s was that not everyone and their mother was a coder, but everyone and their mother did want to be on the internet, and there were none of the aforementioned saas or framework solutions to rely on. in 2016, there's no lack of coders and tooling, so if you don't want to write your own code, you may as well just spend the $10 for a shop overseas to turn your static layout into a responsive webpage overnight. 0. https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/ 1. http://grapesjs.com/ http://grapesjs.com/
- samuell 10y ago
  I second that webflow is seemingly the clearly best stuff out there. Just a pity they don't have a stand-alone client. Can't work on web designs while travelling in some parts of Africa etc, which is a shame :/
- artf 10y ago
  GrapesJS's author here. Firstly, thanks for the mention tribby, appreciate (got +20 stars in few hours :)). Anyway, in this days I plan to make a big update to the site and will add also another demo/preset, the builder for newsletters[0]. The main goal of GrapesJS, indeed, is to replace the common WYSIWYG editors, which are good for content editing but inappropriate for creating HTML structures. 0. https://s30.postimg.org/bbh4gwwdt/top_secret_stuff.png https://s30.postimg.org/bbh4gwwdt/top_secret_stuff.png
- pavlov 10y ago
  ...I don't think WYSIWYG will return in a large way until these editors begin doing "real" front-end lifting -- i.e., "drag and drop this react/vue/whatever component within a grid, without having to know what react/vue/whatever is." React Studio is trying to do that: https://reactstudio.com https://reactstudio.com
deboboy 10y ago
Adobe is going after this space with Muse: http://muse.adobe.com http://muse.adobe.com We've used WebFlow for a couple of years; it doesn't suck and you can actually build an early stage [pre-rev] business with it before committing to a full stack team/budget.
moonlighter 10y ago
Macaw is such a tool, runs on Mac and Windows. It's a free download at http://macaw.co http://macaw.co (the product isn't updated anymore though; the devs have moved on).
- proyb2 10y ago
  macOS is no longer available download but I tried many way to search for it, Windows version still there.
  - toypaj 10y ago
    macOS version is there: http://download.macaw.co/1.6.1/Macaw1.6.1.dmg http://download.macaw.co/1.6.1/Macaw1.6.1.dmg
Animats 10y ago
One of the few remaining alternatives to Dreamweaver is Blue Griffon.[1] It's open source (mostly), but the manual is proprietary. I just downloaded it and tried it. It's a basic HTML editor, not, like Dreamweaver, a site manager. It's heavily oriented towards preparing content for screen readers for the blind, with ARIA features prominent. [1] http://www.bluegriffon.org http://www.bluegriffon.org
frozenport 10y ago
WordPress met those people's requirements
c-smile 10y ago
Last 10 years I am in the business of making WYSIWYG editors of various kinds. Yet I am an author of BlockNote.net HTML WYSIWYG editor (it is pretty old but works up until W7). HTML/CSS WYSIWYG editing from mathematician point of view: Second main task of a browser is: by having given HTML/CSS to produce set of pixels on window's surface. On other side WYSIWYG editor is aimed to solve opposite task: from desired set of pixels (those ones you want to get) to restore/produce acceptable HTML/CSS combination. The problem is that the task can be accomplished only with pure HTML. As soon as you add CSS to the equation acceptable WYSIWYG becomes barely possible: the same set of pixels (rendering on the screen) can be achieved in many different ways. Layout can use floats, absolute positioning, flexes and grids recently, etc. Direct task (rendering) is perfectly formalize-able and solvable (HTML5 and CSS specs) - we have at least three independent implementations of these formalizations. But opposite task (HTML/CSS structure synthesis from given image) has no determined solution. And so different WYSIWYG systems use different approximations. Like Microsoft Word, it produces HTML/CSS documents that are pretty close to what you just saw in it, but that HTML/CSS is barely readable and reusable as HTML/CSS. Others produce readable HTML but rendering is far from what you want to see. Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle. You need to give up something - either WYSIWYG quality per se or feature set. Like you can have WYSIWYG editing but for editable text alike islands: content area of your blog site for example.
- dualogy 10y ago
  Interesting thoughts! > Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle. I think users just need to be (made) aware that any & all web pages' design is always "template/theme"-driven. Even in the absence of CSS: the browser then falls back on its unique user stylesheets / factory defaults (black Times in unpredictable font-size on white background, unless maybe hi-contrast accessibility setup has the colors reversed, unless, unless, etc..) MS Word-style "WYSIWYG" looks like a "simpler" problem in this respect because a piece of paper is a piece of paper (not really though as printing settings can easily mess with what what-they-saw-they-thought-they'd-get). Any sane web-page WYSIWYG must separate the content-formatting-without-tags (bold/italic/a picture floating to the right/etc) from style editing --- so will be essentially (at least) really "2 editors" (in 1). Now as the user quickly grasps this intuitively after just a bit of tinkering, I don't really see the issue anymore?
flukus 10y ago
The biggest reason is that WYSIWYG doesn't really work on the web. What you see on your screen isn't what someone else will see because their monitor is a different size or they are on a mobile device. WYSIWYG requires a fixed layout size, which was common back when dreamweaver/frontpage were around.
- tribby 10y ago
  this is incorrect. almost every modern WYSIWYG editor includes support for media queries.
  - flukus 10y ago
    People that understand media queries don't need WYSIWYG editors. And there are still issues like css being polite suggestions rather than rules a browser has to follow. Firefox recently introduced a readability mode for instance.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >People that understand media queries don't need WYSIWYG editors. That's wrong, and analogous to saying that people who understand low level programming don't need IDEs.
    - FroshKiller 10y ago
      But CSS styling pretty much is a polite suggestion. The browser's job is to retrieve and display content according to the user's needs and preferences. If the designer and the user disagree about whether an unvisited link should be underlined and blue, the user wins. If the designer and the user disagree about whether a page should contain images, the user wins.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >The biggest reason is that WYSIWYG doesn't really work on the web. What you see on your screen isn't what someone else will see because their monitor is a different size or they are on a mobile device. Different screen sizes and WYSIWYG use are orthogonals. Any WYSIWYG editor worth its salt has supported media queries, previewing on different screen sizes, breakpoints, etc for ages.
j45 10y ago
In the past creating rich experiences was in things like Flash. With it's premature flogging, the side effect was there was little to actually and reliably replace the rich experiences it was able to create 2007-08. That's one reason seeing tooling like this, and Adobe Edge is something to look forward to.
- rl3 10y ago
  >That's one reason seeing tooling like this, and Adobe Edge is something to look forward to. Adobe Edge is dead. https://www.adobe.com/products/edge-animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/edge-animate.html Note: As of November 2015, Edge Animate is no longer being actively developed. Prior to cessation of development it stagnated for a few years before finally being put down. Shame, really.
  - j45 10y ago
    Appreciate the clarification, haven't looked at Edge in a long time. Adobe is known to put products in maintenance / off-shore mode where they stay zombie mode for a while.
ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
I think Pingendo [http://pingendo.com http://pingendo.com] qualifies.
elif 10y ago
You are commenting on one..
Kiro 10y ago
The generated HTML/CSS is not semantic and impossible to maintain outside the editor.
jmacd 10y ago
https://www.pagecloud.com/ https://www.pagecloud.com/ might be worth taking a look at. I've been impressed by it.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
With responsive design - that adapts to your viewer, their bandwidth, their device (and orientation), their add-ons (eg uBlock/ABP) - WYSIWYG rather starts to lose meaning. I'd warrant it's easier to design in the abstract than moving elements and watching 5, 20, 100, ... different views to see what your page visitor might see. Now add in progressive enhancement. We're not dealing with the largely fixed desktop viewport anymore. That I suspect is why WYSIWYG hasn't taken off, Dreamweaver did quite well, but then the web ran away to multi-platform as the default.
jasim 10y ago
Webflow is the best all-in-one tool out there. There is also Sketch, which is a vector design tool that shines at designing user interfaces. And unlike Photoshop, it is extremely friendly to the web - if you can do something in Sketch, that can be done in CSS. We're building a tool that converts these designs into code (HTML, CSS, SASS, React, ERB etc). That gives a sort of WYSIWYG workflow for pro users. You can have an expert designer do your design, and then have a developer run with it by generating quality code from them.

by vcool07 10y ago

boxcardavin 10y ago

I'd also love an informed answer about this.

proyb2 10y ago

Namo Webeditor was popular along with many tools, only backend services need lot of effort to maintain. Thee is one professional web design editor who patented it.

devoply 10y ago

My thinking is that they were replaced by dynamic sites based on PHP like WordPress, which initially people were doing template conversions for but eventually they switched to using themes... then we have had a bit of a redux with static site generators, but those are all hobbyist efforts. Dreamweaver still exists, it's just that no one makes those sorts of sites on Dreamweaver any more. There is no market for it. All the developers that might do static frontends code by hand or use a library like Bootstrap or a theme like a WordPress theme. So there is not really much room for a tool like Dreamweaver in the landscape of web design. It's all about modifying existing things to make them fit the problem.

OscarTheGrinch 10y ago
Yeah, also being able to inspect live code in the browser drank dreamweaver's milkshake.

udkl 10y ago

There is https://pinegrow.com/ https://pinegrow.com/ & to some extent Adobe Muse .... but I agree with the sentiment of there not being more options of WYSIWYG editors to choose from.

samuell 10y ago
Ah, didn't know this one ... and even has a linux version, great. Thought macaw was the only option there (light app to be ran on wine), apart from adobe (which are getting too heavy, and thus way too problematic to run on wine).

caryhartline 10y ago

They do exist in different forms. If you're on the level that's just above making a Facebook page then you might go with Squarespace or Wix which have WYSIWYG editors. Surprisingly, Dreamweaver is still a product that is updated(?) and used by many. When it comes to the high-end, there are Mac apps such as Hype and Sparkle which are used especially for developers who want to create animated websites. It's also the case that creating a webpage isn't the most important thing anymore. Many businesses only exist on Etsy and Facebook. The time when knowing what html is and knowing how Dreamweaver works meant you could make a living off of anyone who wanted to be "on the Internet" is kinda over.

JonathonW 10y ago
Dreamweaver's still around (and just got a big update as part of the Adobe CC 2017 wave of apps), but Adobe seems to be positioning Muse more as the code-free WYSIWYG HTML editor now-- modern Dreamweaver's very code-focused.

maxmcd 10y ago

In my limited experience the market asking for and building sites on dreamweaver has completely shifted to squarespace, wix, etc.

intrasight 10y ago

The underlying JS and HTML5 frameworks change too quickly for that to work. Companies that tried have presumably lost their shirts. But I'd say that's a good thing in that now web development is a "fill the area under the demand curve" type of undertaking. You can spend between $10^1 and $10^7 on a web site.

pcr0 10y ago

A bunch of reasons, including lack of market, complexity of today's web. They aren't entirely gone though, this was posted to HN a while ago: https://preview.webflow.com/preview/flexbox-game?preview=d1a26b027c4803817087a91c651e321f&m=1 https://preview.webflow.com/preview/flexbox-game?preview=d1a... It's a game in their editor that teaches you flexbox.

tluyben2 10y ago
Complexity? Web apps are often complex yes but web pages? Even the Webflow homepage/marketing pages look identical to every web site posted here. So the lack of market yes; people take a template/code and change the content. Not sure if web apps were ever a good fit for tools like this as that is more like a full IDE as it would need coding as well to make sense. At least allow to specify data structures as in and out for the components you are designing.
- pcr0 10y ago
  Considering even web pages today though, it's not often I want to build everything from scratch using just HTML. Rather I want to be able to drag and drop bootstrap/foundation/material components, but since I can't I might as well just use a dumb editor and live-reload changes in my browser as WYISWYG isn't working for me anymore. And I agree, WYISWYG editors fall far behind IDEs and text editors when it comes to the code.

tribby 10y ago

> Could any expert shed any information on why we lack a professional front-end WYSIWYG kind of editor for the web ? we don't. webflow[0] is the best I've seen. there's an OSS clone called grapejs[1], but it's still very alpha. one reason we don't see greater adoption is that WYSIWYG editors for the web occupy a sort of middle ground between template-based hosts like squarespace, weebly, etc, and opinionated low-barrier-to-entry frameworks like bootstrap. I think there's some market, especially for prototyping, one-off marketing pages, and people who don't already have a preferred design workflow, but I don't think WYSIWYG will return in a large way until these editors begin doing "real" front-end lifting -- i.e., "drag and drop this react/vue/whatever component within a grid, without having to know what react/vue/whatever is." the appeal of dreamweaver, frontpage, and all of those editors in the 90s was that not everyone and their mother was a coder, but everyone and their mother did want to be on the internet, and there were none of the aforementioned saas or framework solutions to rely on. in 2016, there's no lack of coders and tooling, so if you don't want to write your own code, you may as well just spend the $10 for a shop overseas to turn your static layout into a responsive webpage overnight. 0. https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/ 1. http://grapesjs.com/ http://grapesjs.com/

samuell 10y ago
I second that webflow is seemingly the clearly best stuff out there. Just a pity they don't have a stand-alone client. Can't work on web designs while travelling in some parts of Africa etc, which is a shame :/
artf 10y ago
GrapesJS's author here. Firstly, thanks for the mention tribby, appreciate (got +20 stars in few hours :)). Anyway, in this days I plan to make a big update to the site and will add also another demo/preset, the builder for newsletters[0]. The main goal of GrapesJS, indeed, is to replace the common WYSIWYG editors, which are good for content editing but inappropriate for creating HTML structures. 0. https://s30.postimg.org/bbh4gwwdt/top_secret_stuff.png https://s30.postimg.org/bbh4gwwdt/top_secret_stuff.png
pavlov 10y ago
...I don't think WYSIWYG will return in a large way until these editors begin doing "real" front-end lifting -- i.e., "drag and drop this react/vue/whatever component within a grid, without having to know what react/vue/whatever is." React Studio is trying to do that: https://reactstudio.com https://reactstudio.com

deboboy 10y ago

Adobe is going after this space with Muse: http://muse.adobe.com http://muse.adobe.com We've used WebFlow for a couple of years; it doesn't suck and you can actually build an early stage [pre-rev] business with it before committing to a full stack team/budget.

moonlighter 10y ago

Macaw is such a tool, runs on Mac and Windows. It's a free download at http://macaw.co http://macaw.co (the product isn't updated anymore though; the devs have moved on).

proyb2 10y ago
macOS is no longer available download but I tried many way to search for it, Windows version still there.
- toypaj 10y ago
  macOS version is there: http://download.macaw.co/1.6.1/Macaw1.6.1.dmg http://download.macaw.co/1.6.1/Macaw1.6.1.dmg

Animats 10y ago

One of the few remaining alternatives to Dreamweaver is Blue Griffon.[1] It's open source (mostly), but the manual is proprietary. I just downloaded it and tried it. It's a basic HTML editor, not, like Dreamweaver, a site manager. It's heavily oriented towards preparing content for screen readers for the blind, with ARIA features prominent. [1] http://www.bluegriffon.org http://www.bluegriffon.org

frozenport 10y ago

WordPress met those people's requirements

c-smile 10y ago

Last 10 years I am in the business of making WYSIWYG editors of various kinds. Yet I am an author of BlockNote.net HTML WYSIWYG editor (it is pretty old but works up until W7). HTML/CSS WYSIWYG editing from mathematician point of view: Second main task of a browser is: by having given HTML/CSS to produce set of pixels on window's surface. On other side WYSIWYG editor is aimed to solve opposite task: from desired set of pixels (those ones you want to get) to restore/produce acceptable HTML/CSS combination. The problem is that the task can be accomplished only with pure HTML. As soon as you add CSS to the equation acceptable WYSIWYG becomes barely possible: the same set of pixels (rendering on the screen) can be achieved in many different ways. Layout can use floats, absolute positioning, flexes and grids recently, etc. Direct task (rendering) is perfectly formalize-able and solvable (HTML5 and CSS specs) - we have at least three independent implementations of these formalizations. But opposite task (HTML/CSS structure synthesis from given image) has no determined solution. And so different WYSIWYG systems use different approximations. Like Microsoft Word, it produces HTML/CSS documents that are pretty close to what you just saw in it, but that HTML/CSS is barely readable and reusable as HTML/CSS. Others produce readable HTML but rendering is far from what you want to see. Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle. You need to give up something - either WYSIWYG quality per se or feature set. Like you can have WYSIWYG editing but for editable text alike islands: content area of your blog site for example.

dualogy 10y ago
Interesting thoughts! > Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle. I think users just need to be (made) aware that any & all web pages' design is always "template/theme"-driven. Even in the absence of CSS: the browser then falls back on its unique user stylesheets / factory defaults (black Times in unpredictable font-size on white background, unless maybe hi-contrast accessibility setup has the colors reversed, unless, unless, etc..) MS Word-style "WYSIWYG" looks like a "simpler" problem in this respect because a piece of paper is a piece of paper (not really though as printing settings can easily mess with what what-they-saw-they-thought-they'd-get). Any sane web-page WYSIWYG must separate the content-formatting-without-tags (bold/italic/a picture floating to the right/etc) from style editing --- so will be essentially (at least) really "2 editors" (in 1). Now as the user quickly grasps this intuitively after just a bit of tinkering, I don't really see the issue anymore?

flukus 10y ago

The biggest reason is that WYSIWYG doesn't really work on the web. What you see on your screen isn't what someone else will see because their monitor is a different size or they are on a mobile device. WYSIWYG requires a fixed layout size, which was common back when dreamweaver/frontpage were around.

tribby 10y ago
this is incorrect. almost every modern WYSIWYG editor includes support for media queries.
- flukus 10y ago
  People that understand media queries don't need WYSIWYG editors. And there are still issues like css being polite suggestions rather than rules a browser has to follow. Firefox recently introduced a readability mode for instance.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >People that understand media queries don't need WYSIWYG editors. That's wrong, and analogous to saying that people who understand low level programming don't need IDEs.
  - FroshKiller 10y ago
    But CSS styling pretty much is a polite suggestion. The browser's job is to retrieve and display content according to the user's needs and preferences. If the designer and the user disagree about whether an unvisited link should be underlined and blue, the user wins. If the designer and the user disagree about whether a page should contain images, the user wins.
coldtea 10y ago
>The biggest reason is that WYSIWYG doesn't really work on the web. What you see on your screen isn't what someone else will see because their monitor is a different size or they are on a mobile device. Different screen sizes and WYSIWYG use are orthogonals. Any WYSIWYG editor worth its salt has supported media queries, previewing on different screen sizes, breakpoints, etc for ages.

j45 10y ago

In the past creating rich experiences was in things like Flash. With it's premature flogging, the side effect was there was little to actually and reliably replace the rich experiences it was able to create 2007-08. That's one reason seeing tooling like this, and Adobe Edge is something to look forward to.

rl3 10y ago
>That's one reason seeing tooling like this, and Adobe Edge is something to look forward to. Adobe Edge is dead. https://www.adobe.com/products/edge-animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/edge-animate.html Note: As of November 2015, Edge Animate is no longer being actively developed. Prior to cessation of development it stagnated for a few years before finally being put down. Shame, really.
- j45 10y ago
  Appreciate the clarification, haven't looked at Edge in a long time. Adobe is known to put products in maintenance / off-shore mode where they stay zombie mode for a while.

ezequiel-garzon 10y ago

I think Pingendo [http://pingendo.com http://pingendo.com] qualifies.

elif 10y ago

You are commenting on one..

Kiro 10y ago

The generated HTML/CSS is not semantic and impossible to maintain outside the editor.

jmacd 10y ago

https://www.pagecloud.com/ https://www.pagecloud.com/ might be worth taking a look at. I've been impressed by it.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago

With responsive design - that adapts to your viewer, their bandwidth, their device (and orientation), their add-ons (eg uBlock/ABP) - WYSIWYG rather starts to lose meaning. I'd warrant it's easier to design in the abstract than moving elements and watching 5, 20, 100, ... different views to see what your page visitor might see. Now add in progressive enhancement. We're not dealing with the largely fixed desktop viewport anymore. That I suspect is why WYSIWYG hasn't taken off, Dreamweaver did quite well, but then the web ran away to multi-platform as the default.

jasim 10y ago

Webflow is the best all-in-one tool out there. There is also Sketch, which is a vector design tool that shines at designing user interfaces. And unlike Photoshop, it is extremely friendly to the web - if you can do something in Sketch, that can be done in CSS. We're building a tool that converts these designs into code (HTML, CSS, SASS, React, ERB etc). That gives a sort of WYSIWYG workflow for pro users. You can have an expert designer do your design, and then have a developer run with it by generating quality code from them.