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I believe Visual Basic was spectacularly successful in part because it did visual layout; and there several tools that do the same thing for webpages. I guess

by 10ren 16y ago

I believe Visual Basic was spectacularly successful in part because it did visual layout; and there several tools that do the same thing for webpages. I guess you're saying the difficulty is doing it in a webapp. Maybe with faster machines and better support etc and RIA this may now be workable. There's certainly no intrinsic reason for it not to work.

pak 16y ago
The intrinsic reason that web layout is particularly hard to do in an IDE is because the interactions between JS, HTML, and CSS are hard to fully represent in an editor. There is no simplistic, uniform layout system as you'd find in Cocoa or WinForms. I can't think of a way to represent CSS z-index, positioning, floating, rulesets etc. in a GUI without drastically oversimplifying all of them. If you try to fully express the power of CSS in an IDE you basically get a slightly enhanced code editor or a million property panels a la Dreamweaver. You could also completely throw out the entire architecture of CSS and build your own layout engine. The best example of this is probably Atlas for Cappucino (http://280atlas.com/what.php http://280atlas.com/what.php). The problem is this winds up destroying many of the principles that make the web great like graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. You can't build a webapp in Atlas that will work without JavaScript or CSS, and the generated code is not SEO readable. That may be acceptable for a desktop-replacement web app but my impression is that Codeless is shooting for smaller things like blogs, CMS's, etc. which should be able to function as "good" web content. I don't know, I will have to wait and see what others think as the pay-for-beta is not an option I will take...
- asnyder 16y ago
  You should know that there are tools such as NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com http://www.noloh.com) that do take into account the evolution and architecture of the web and do gracefully degrade, and are SEO readable. You can also fully use your CSS with your objects if you like, though you don't need to. See: http://dev.noloh.com/#/articles/NOLOH-and-CSS/ http://dev.noloh.com/#/articles/NOLOH-and-CSS/. Furthermore, these concepts can in fact be represented in an IDE, once you have the sort of unification NOLOH provides, unfortunately I can't really say much more at the moment. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH.

by 10ren 16y ago

pak 16y ago

The intrinsic reason that web layout is particularly hard to do in an IDE is because the interactions between JS, HTML, and CSS are hard to fully represent in an editor. There is no simplistic, uniform layout system as you'd find in Cocoa or WinForms. I can't think of a way to represent CSS z-index, positioning, floating, rulesets etc. in a GUI without drastically oversimplifying all of them. If you try to fully express the power of CSS in an IDE you basically get a slightly enhanced code editor or a million property panels a la Dreamweaver. You could also completely throw out the entire architecture of CSS and build your own layout engine. The best example of this is probably Atlas for Cappucino (http://280atlas.com/what.php http://280atlas.com/what.php). The problem is this winds up destroying many of the principles that make the web great like graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. You can't build a webapp in Atlas that will work without JavaScript or CSS, and the generated code is not SEO readable. That may be acceptable for a desktop-replacement web app but my impression is that Codeless is shooting for smaller things like blogs, CMS's, etc. which should be able to function as "good" web content. I don't know, I will have to wait and see what others think as the pay-for-beta is not an option I will take...

asnyder 16y ago
You should know that there are tools such as NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com http://www.noloh.com) that do take into account the evolution and architecture of the web and do gracefully degrade, and are SEO readable. You can also fully use your CSS with your objects if you like, though you don't need to. See: http://dev.noloh.com/#/articles/NOLOH-and-CSS/ http://dev.noloh.com/#/articles/NOLOH-and-CSS/. Furthermore, these concepts can in fact be represented in an IDE, once you have the sort of unification NOLOH provides, unfortunately I can't really say much more at the moment. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH.