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From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now? I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn

From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now? I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn't like what it generated. I've written a few pages manually (first when learning HTML ca 2004, then for a personal website in 2014) and it felt much nicer. I have made Windows applications with GUIs as part of my job and for that I've mainly used WPF written as a mix of XAML and C#, written by hand and inspected in the editor. There are graphical tools, but I've mostly found it more efficient to write what you mean directly. But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?

machiaweliczny 5y ago
By hand but there's a lot of ready-made components (React).
- meerita 5y ago
  And developers use zillions of libraries too. In the end devs write less code.
542458 5y ago
Wix and Shopify are both multi billion dollar companies that give casual users access to websites that would previously require dedicated devs. This is done via elaborate WYSIWYG website editing. There used to be decent business in low-end web dev, banging out high volumes of simple websites and storefronts - but that market has been in large part taken over by WYSIWYG tools.
- Jach 5y ago
  There's still decent business in sharecropping Wix/Shopify/Salesforce/etc. Very quickly companies find that the out of the box stuff doesn't do 100% of what they want, so they need to pay to get that last bit and develop custom components..which yeah, anyone can then drag onto the appropriate pages, instead of having to pay someone who happens to know how to FTP things onto a server.
- meerita 5y ago
  Yes, but I meant as development not as final customer. I agree that even those examples don't affect real software projects.
deergomoo 5y ago
> But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays? We still write HTML (ish), but then we compile it into JavaScript functions, which then generate HTML again on the client. I'm being slightly facetious, but that's basically what a modern web app written with Vue/React/Svelte/Angular does.
meerita 5y ago
You basically open your Terminal, run dozens of NPM commands and install dozens of libs and start writing javascript, css and jsx. Then you run commands to build and deploy.

machiaweliczny 5y ago

By hand but there's a lot of ready-made components (React).

meerita 5y ago
And developers use zillions of libraries too. In the end devs write less code.

542458 5y ago

Wix and Shopify are both multi billion dollar companies that give casual users access to websites that would previously require dedicated devs. This is done via elaborate WYSIWYG website editing. There used to be decent business in low-end web dev, banging out high volumes of simple websites and storefronts - but that market has been in large part taken over by WYSIWYG tools.

Jach 5y ago
There's still decent business in sharecropping Wix/Shopify/Salesforce/etc. Very quickly companies find that the out of the box stuff doesn't do 100% of what they want, so they need to pay to get that last bit and develop custom components..which yeah, anyone can then drag onto the appropriate pages, instead of having to pay someone who happens to know how to FTP things onto a server.
meerita 5y ago
Yes, but I meant as development not as final customer. I agree that even those examples don't affect real software projects.

deergomoo 5y ago

> But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays? We still write HTML (ish), but then we compile it into JavaScript functions, which then generate HTML again on the client. I'm being slightly facetious, but that's basically what a modern web app written with Vue/React/Svelte/Angular does.

meerita 5y ago

You basically open your Terminal, run dozens of NPM commands and install dozens of libs and start writing javascript, css and jsx. Then you run commands to build and deploy.