4 ms·

Interesting I hear what you're saying about nested layouts and dynamic behaviour but do you think this would be good for individual components (even if these a

Interesting I hear what you're saying about nested layouts and dynamic behaviour but do you think this would be good for individual components (even if these are large components such as page layouts?)

preommr 6y ago
No, because components implies inputs (props), and things like conditional rendering, or slots (props.children), or even life cycle hooks. You'd have to make code style decisions like what kind of code style to use (functional vs class in react e.g.). Even if somebody did do all of this, merging the file from the app into a real project would be difficult. There'd have to be rules about merging, and diffing, and command line tools, etc. Maintaining and documenting all of this would be an absolute nightmare. And that's not even getting into engineering or marketing difficulties because you'll have people confused about the product identity, or say that it's too complex, or that it's buggy because it has so many more features now. And all this for pretty much nothing. Because figma already has css exports (even if it's iffy, they're working on it). You export the styles, the padding, the colors, and that's what people really want to get from their figma files. So you get most of the way there for a much, much smaller fraction of effort.
- celim307 6y ago
  Agreed with this, the tooling for pumping out presentational only components is already there.
  - debaserab2 6y ago
    Is the output suitable enough for a decent UX testing prototype?
    - andratwiro 6y ago
      I swear I don't work for Framer, but I've been using it very intensively for UX testing and users aren't capable of differentiating the prototypes from the actual real thing: https://www.framer.com/user-testing/ https://www.framer.com/user-testing/ The prototypes can be heavy on the browser, but once you go past that the immersion level is deep. You can even add custom google analytics events for quant analysis.
      - debaserab2 6y ago
        Thanks for this, I'll keep this in mind.

preommr 6y ago

No, because components implies inputs (props), and things like conditional rendering, or slots (props.children), or even life cycle hooks. You'd have to make code style decisions like what kind of code style to use (functional vs class in react e.g.). Even if somebody did do all of this, merging the file from the app into a real project would be difficult. There'd have to be rules about merging, and diffing, and command line tools, etc. Maintaining and documenting all of this would be an absolute nightmare. And that's not even getting into engineering or marketing difficulties because you'll have people confused about the product identity, or say that it's too complex, or that it's buggy because it has so many more features now. And all this for pretty much nothing. Because figma already has css exports (even if it's iffy, they're working on it). You export the styles, the padding, the colors, and that's what people really want to get from their figma files. So you get most of the way there for a much, much smaller fraction of effort.

celim307 6y ago
Agreed with this, the tooling for pumping out presentational only components is already there.
- debaserab2 6y ago
  Is the output suitable enough for a decent UX testing prototype?
  - andratwiro 6y ago
    I swear I don't work for Framer, but I've been using it very intensively for UX testing and users aren't capable of differentiating the prototypes from the actual real thing: https://www.framer.com/user-testing/ https://www.framer.com/user-testing/ The prototypes can be heavy on the browser, but once you go past that the immersion level is deep. You can even add custom google analytics events for quant analysis.
    - debaserab2 6y ago
      Thanks for this, I'll keep this in mind.