17 ms·
Oh, Adobe... read the copy, then view the source.
- alfiejohn_ 15y agoBridge to Engine Room: We need more DIVs
- jjm 15y agoCap'n, Engine Room here - We've diverted emergency DIVs to sensors, increasing noob sensing range. We'll need more add-ons if yer want mowr DIVs!
- terinjokes 15y agoI read this in my "Enterprise problem of the week" voice.
- M1573RMU74710N 15y agoMy...only....regret...is that....I have......div-itis...
- nfm 15y agoThat was worse than I prepared myself for! Almost the entire page is duplicated within a `<!--[if lt IE 9]>` block...
- antimora 15y agoI was shocked too. I couldn't believe the commented section was that long.
- mambodog 15y agoThis is a great example of following the letter of a standard, but not the spirit.
- kysol 15y ago580 . . . Need more . . . <div id="yo-dawg"> <div id="i-put-div-in-your-div"> <div id="so-you-can-div-while-you-div">This site built in Muse (code name) by Adobe®</div> </div> </div>
- pierreminik 15y agoPlease, tell me this is Adobe trying to mock IE. It has to be, right? I mean, they've always sort of not valued source code, but this is beyond torturing it. This is so inspirationally horrible someone spent hours remaking it, like it should've been: http://studentweb.infotech.monash.edu/~wlay/FIT1012/muse-demo/ http://studentweb.infotech.monash.edu/~wlay/FIT1012/muse-dem....
- InclinedPlane 15y agoIndeed. The inefficiency here is astounding, especially considering the relatively straightforward page layout involved. Original: 1496 lines, 77.9kB Your version: 104 lines, 4.75kB I'd thought we'd progressed beyond the state of a decade ago where Dreamweaver or what-have-you would build you a cumbersome and baroque html splooge to match whatever you had done in the designer, but I guess we haven't advanced that far. Just goes to show you that front-end devs are still as necessary as ever I suppose.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoAs long as tools like Dreamweaver exist, there will be a need for good front-end developers to clean up the mess.
- ramen 15y agoWhat a shameful waste of a good front-end developer's time.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago"What a [lucrative] waste of a good front-end developer's time."
- barnaby 15y agoYou couldn't pay me enough to _maintain_ that mess. Not even a unit test in sight if something breaks.
- josscrowcroft 15y ago"You can design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code" - WTF I think compounding all this inefficiency is how they have "<!-- group -->" on EVERY SINGLE DIV. Someone should use the Tilt extension to visualise this page in 3D (http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-page-in-3d/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/07/tilt-visualize-your-web-pag...) and screen cap it.
- bherms 15y agohttp://dl.dropbox.com/u/661094/tilt.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/661094/tilt.png
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- riffraff 15y agohonestly that does not seem too bad
- william42 15y agoNow do it for the remake posted up in this thread.
- bherms 15y agoI tried it, but for some reason the plugin/my browser had a big problem with the remake. There were very few layers, but it was overlaying my calendar onto the image or something strange. I restarted the browser and tried again but it kept messing up.
- zacharyvoase 15y agoHas anyone seen the video? They're trying desperately to map print paradigms to the web. It's a major fallacy which many developers (and product managers) fall into.
- jackowayed 15y agoSo it will sell well to companies with a lot of money, then? Sounds like a good product.
- pyre 15y agoIt will sell well to companies with a lot of money by telling them what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear. It depends on your definition of a 'good product.'
- yuhong 15y agoI am not surprised. What do you think WYSIWYG is supposed to mean?
- shabble 15y agoIdeally, you'd have "What I See Is What You Get." Then traditional designers (the "I") can have their pixel-perfect whatevers reproduce exactly on every single system/configuration (the "You"). Or, you could have "What You See Is What You Want, Based On What I Think Is A Good Way To Do This (But You Can Also Choose)" Things like resolution independence, mobile/small display support, gestural interaction support, impaired-senses accessibility, graceful degradation, and multi-browser compatibility all go towards into that, IMO. It may not be identical on every system, but it will look good and be usable. I can't really see WYSIWYW,BOWITIAGWTDT(BYCAC) being the next sales paradigm shifting quantum leap of buzzwordology though.
- realize 15y agoThat is one of the most horrible things I've ever seen. Adobe, please stop having such bad taste. Whenever there's a right way to do things, you seem to commit to the OTHER way.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoWow, looks like you really _can_ create striking sites with Muse: http://maxart.s3.amazonaws.com/muse/index.html http://maxart.s3.amazonaws.com/muse/index.html
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agoParticularly amused by <p class="paragraph">
- lean 15y agoOOCSS says to never specify elements in the CSS, right? :)
- cloudwalking 15y agoPeople on HN love ripping on Adobe. I agree that the code is gross, but can we get some constructive criticism? What's a better way to programmatically write good HTML? I'm willing to bet everybody on this thread writes their HTML by hand. How many of you have a framework for programmatically writing HTML? How many have a framework for writing HTML as broadly as Muse can?
- sunchild 15y agoWYSIWYG for HTML is just never a good thing. You spend more time learning the idiosyncrasies of a crippled GUI when you could just get busy in a text file.
- skrebbel 15y agoI agree! I also think compilers are ridiculous. You spend much more time tuning their output and learning their arcane options and switches and pragmas than you would need just writing ASM by hand.
- orblivion 15y agoYour argument is against haml, not a gui.
- skrebbel 15y agoOh well I also think vi is ridiculous so there :P
- fullmoon 15y agoReductio ad absurdum? :(
- InclinedPlane 15y agoIf modern compilers were as inefficient and horrid as html design tools were a lot of people would code directly in ASM. Also, HTML is not ASM, it's a very high level language. The ability to code a scant few hundred lines and nevertheless have that become a full-featured, rich, beautiful, and complete layout for a web page or a web app UI is tremendously powerful, and it's no wonder that high end web devs and designers take advantage of that. Until web design "compilers" approach anywhere within spitting distance (even within a factor of 2) of hand coded designs in terms of maintainability, cross-browser compatability, performance, and code size that's not going to change.
- X-Istence 15y agoSince everyone is saying look at the source, might I suggest taking a look at the CSS that is produced for that specific page ... yes, I said page. Each page has its own CSS file that is REALLY big.
- olalonde 15y agoI'm definitely playing the devil's advocate here, but didn't assembly programmers have the same kind of reaction regarding compiler generated assembly not so long ago?
- perlgeek 15y agoAt least the compilers produce valid assembler code most of the time.
- Deestan 15y agoAssembly is low level; practically machine code. It is hard for humans to read, and writing a program concept in assembly must go through a lot of layers. HTML is high-level and designed for humans to read and write. It maps directly to the concepts it conveys.
- cksk 15y agoI registered just so I could say this. People keep comparing HTML to Assembly. Come on. HTML is probably the highest level you can get when talking to a computer, at least for the foreseeable future. I think the more appropriate comparison is to those software generators, or whatever they are called, in which you drag and drop buttons and text fields and have arrows (or something) to convey action. You don't see a lot of good software made with those, now, do you? HTML is not Assembly. It's not even C. It's Python, or Ruby.
- stephen_g 15y agoAs Deestan said, there's a massive difference between how low level assembly code is, and how high level HTML is. But even more than that is the fact that they're fundamentally different. Decomposing a sequential list of instructions down into machine code is something that a is fairly simple to do algorithmically. But HTML is not a programming language - it is a descriptive instead of declarative or imperative. In the end, humans are a lot better at describing things than algorithms, and I think that's the biggest problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors.
- mcauser 15y agoMakes ColdFusion look efficient by comparison
- armandososa 15y agoI recommend reading this post by Zeldman from last year: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/05/an-indesign-for-html-and-css/ http://www.zeldman.com/2010/07/05/an-indesign-for-html-and-c... Says Nack: As I noted the other day, “Almost no one would look inside, say, an EPS file and harrumph, ‘Well, that’s not how I’d write PostScript’–but they absolutely do that with HTML.”
- Sniffnoy 15y agoI find your largely contextless restatement of the quote a bit odd, when the actual post is quoting that from somewhere else, and explaining why this is so (when out of context the quote seems to imply that this shouldn't be so).
- armandososa 15y agoit's a teaser not a TL;DR; read the context.
- potatolicious 15y agoThere's a good reason for that - clean HTML is not just the territory of pedantic/obsessive designers, it has tangible and important benefits to many sites (note: many, not all). Sure, if you want a personal homepage, or put up an ode to your dog Scruffy on the internet, tools like this may very well work for you. But in those use cases, we've already had capable tools for years, many of which produce cleaner code than this. For anything bigger/more professional, dirty/bloated HTML/CSS means a few things: - Bigger downloads for your visitors, wasting their bandwidth. But whatever, you're not paying for that, right? - More data transfer for you and your host. That you do pay for. - Increased latency (sometimes massively) and decreased accessibility for people with slower connections. Given the awesomeness of American broadband performance, that means most of your customers/visitors. More latency = more bounces = fewer visitors buying stuff from you, reading your ad copy, etc etc. - Increased rendering times. See: bounce rate. And these aren't negligible effects. The difference between a 10KB and 100KB file is very significant, and you don't need millions of uniques a month to find out the difference. Dirty EPS files are not the same thing - because unclean PostScript suffers from none of these deficiencies except bigger downloads - which for EPS files has little to no consequence in the typical use case.
- azulum 15y agoMuse (code name) Design and publish unreadable HTML because you don't write code.
- jmitcheson 15y agoThere is company that makes a Photoshop plugin that converts to HTML/CSS/Images too http://www.medialab.com/ http://www.medialab.com/ I don't know what the output is like, though.
- rrrazdan 15y agoThe sense I am getting is that GUI generation of markup code is as inevitable as was the first compiler back in the old days. Whether that point is now or not remains to be seen. Back then we had a combination of increase in RAM sizes/processor speed and democratization of Computers beyond advanced research laboratories, that prompted this change. It no longer was necessary to worry about that extra 10 KB or so of cruft that the compiler added. I see similar concerns about file sizes here, whether the point of not caring for bandwidth is here remains to be seen. And could this be the second wave of web democratization? I'd love to see my mum design her website with this.
- mattmanser 15y agoAre you too young to remember front page? We've already trod this path and it lead us to dark places.
- rrrazdan 15y agoLike I said the correct time and the correct product will be the beginning of a new era. It definitely wasn't time then, and it may not be now, but isn't it kinda inevitable, that we would someday move to a layer of abstraction above the html code?
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- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- apricot13 15y agodiv soup is better than table soup!
- leon_ 15y agoSo they use tables. Big deal. I don't get that CSS snobbery. Tables do work on even older browsers. That's something you want for a tool that generates code for people who don't want/can't put up with writing HTML themselves. For them the product has to work and look good in most of the browsers.
- intranation 15y agoIt's not CSS snobbery. It's HTML snobbery, which to some people still matters, for the usual accessibility reasons as well as wanting to write the correct code for the job.
- leon_ 15y agoSure, but if you're hired to write HTML code then I guess you won't be using tools like this. You know how to work around browser perks. But Joe who just wants a website made probably doesn't - and he doesn't care.
- andybak 15y agoDid you actually look at the code?
- Tractiol 15y agoHilarious how many people on Hacker News care what the HTML looks like. You really are idiots if you're worried about 'that much text' going over the internet. You have no concept of data.
- stephen_g 15y agoSome people here actually run popular web sites. When you're serving millions of requests a day, a few KB of difference in page size can make quite a bit of difference on how much you pay for bandwidth... Not to mention that when a browser doesn't render the page correctly, some people don't like wading through thousands of lines of div-soup when they could be debugging one hundred and fifty lines of markup instead...
- arnorhs 15y agoThis software, Muse, was not used to build that website. The software used is Business Catalyst (http://businesscatalyst.com/ http://businesscatalyst.com/), an enterprise CMS (all-in-one solution urgh) Adobe bought 2-3 years ago. And yes, the semantics are very bad. In fact, I disliked this piece of software so much, I wrote a post about it a few months ago: http://arnorhs.com/2011/01/19/11-reasons-why-business-catalyst-sucks/ http://arnorhs.com/2011/01/19/11-reasons-why-business-cataly...
- rb2k_ 15y agoThe only thing I see is that the jquery is served from a CDN address that has catalyst in the name. Where else do you see something pointing at Business Catalyst?
- arnorhs 15y agoAlso at the top there's this comment: <!-- BC_OBNW --> also see: http://twitter.com/#!/bc_obnw http://twitter.com/#!/bc_obnw And if you view a screenshot of the html of the top of the page and compare that with the BC website: http://cl.ly/2g2w0I3w0L1m1R1j1Z1O http://cl.ly/2g2w0I3w0L1m1R1j1Z1O vs http://cl.ly/0m3Y0s0J3r0d3H3h4626 http://cl.ly/0m3Y0s0J3r0d3H3h4626 When you think of it, it is very possible that the website's theme/html/CSS was built using muse at one point, but then it might have been transformed into a BC theme/template
- phsr 15y agoThat is probably the case. Probably all of Adobe's sites are managed by Business Catalyst.
- acostin 15y agoThis is correct, the site is hosted on Business Catalyst, but the generated markup is pure Muse. BC can host any HTML files, we don't enforce a specific markup or template constraints. Alexandru
- phsr 15y agoScroll down to the bottom of the page, it states: "This site built in Muse (code name) by Adobe®".
- corry 15y agoI agree that coding your design into HTML/CSS is a waste of time generally. I've had good luck with PSD-to-HTML services. So instead of Adobe automagically converting my design to HTML/CSS/images, you get humans from India (or wherever) doing it by hand. For $100 - $200 you can get clean, cross-browser, easily tweakable HTML/CSS and images. And you get it in 24 hrs. I've used www.psd2html.com a few times and the quality was quite high.
- RobLach 15y agoI wouldn't recommend Muse purely because this is how that page renders for me: http://i.imgur.com/c7tBl.png http://i.imgur.com/c7tBl.png http://i.imgur.com/6DUW0.png http://i.imgur.com/6DUW0.png http://i.imgur.com/sfGmv.png http://i.imgur.com/sfGmv.png
- chaz 15y agoWhich browser / OS?
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoCharacters: 32,767 Characters after stripping HTML, javascript and CSS: 1,464
- epo 15y agoOn a casual inspection this is just bloated ineptness, exactly what I have come to expect from Adobe. One passage consisted of a string of empty divs of the form <div class="wrap"></div> which a decent 'code generator' would simply have omitted. In fact the bulk of the bloat appears to be divs which add nothing to the page. I strongly suspect one previous version of this code generated tables, then they got the "tables used for layout are bad" memo and did a simplistic translation to nested divs. Perhaps, to be charitable, they have debugging turned on.
- cbs 15y agoOh heavens! An ugly html file? We can't have one of those dirtying up our monstrosity that poorly attempts to turn a document into an application.
- beatpanda 15y agoThis is a great product, insofar as 10-year-olds will steal it from BitTorrent and use it to get their first taste of web design, then stop using it once they get serious, then reminisce about how terrible their first projects were. Just like lots of us did with FrontPage.
- secoif 15y agoI have seen far, far more bloated code generated by Drupal (esp. Using panels module)
- QuantumDoja 15y agoQ. How many of your visitors look at your pages source code? Q. How many times do you inspect the compiled assembly to see what it generated? One day these tools will be perfect, it's just a shame for me that Adobe have copied what I've done for the second time: http://blog.gameweaver.com/2011/08/16/has-adobe-copied-another-one-of-my-ideas/ http://blog.gameweaver.com/2011/08/16/has-adobe-copied-anoth...