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There is a serious knowledge gap between what you just wrote and the actual reality out there. I don't want to convince you of anything, just share the knowledg

There is a serious knowledge gap between what you just wrote and the actual reality out there. I don't want to convince you of anything, just share the knowledge of what's actually happening. Why tools like Webflow have $4bln valuation and why there are millions of webflow developers. 1. You are looking at it in black/white. Coder vs nocoder. That's not how it is in reality. There is a seriously big amount of people who understand enough of coding to use webflow comfortably but not enough to write code by hand and/or wanting to do so. 2. Designers are used to visual tools. They find their way when tool allows to experiment without first studying how to code and then gradually learn css/html basics if they need to. 3. Building layouts, styling, html structure etc is actually faster with webflow once you understand how it works and learn all the shortcuts. If you actually care to learn about it, go talk to some pro webflow devs. Some of them will tell you they actualy know how to code, but its less efficient for a lot of use cases. 4. Handoff. A huge problem with building websites is wasted time between a designer and a developer. There is just too many things to consider and a static design in figma is never complete. Webstudio and Webflow aims at solving or at least reducing the handoff by either building directly in Webstudio/Webflow or by keeping figma design low-fidelity just for initial communication with the customer and then moving on to building. 5. This industry has come a long way and these days several tools are also integrating with git-based developer workflows. The goal is to let designers and visual developers to build visual components and design systems in the builder ui and provide those components to developers for further integration. 6. There is a clearly steep learning curve with Webflow. Lots of things are not easy to get. Its not a tool to build a website in 5 minutes, its a tool to learn html/css visually and become pro visual developer. Once you are there, the typical landing sites and marketing pages, even large one are built significantly faster and more presize from design perspective than with coding. I am saying this as an engineer who started building for the web in 2004. This is not meant to start an argument. Just pointing out a lot of stuff that is understandably not clear to many.

danielvaughn 3y ago
Totally reasonable response, and thanks for taking the criticism well - I hope it didn't come off as too harsh. I mostly agree with everything you wrote, just one thing I'd say: Designers may be used to visual tools, but IMO it's a hangup. It's like someone telling you that they find it easier to click File > Copy > File > Paste because they're not used to typing "ctrl c > ctrl v". I get the psychology of it, but it's objectively wrong - a keyboard shortcut will always be more efficient and everyone who learns them is better off for it. Code is like that but on steroids. If there's an efficiency gap then it's an issue with dev tooling (which IMO is 100% true in lots of cases), not inherently with code.
- oleg009 3y ago
  Here again you show lack of nuance. Pro webflow developers use keyboard a lot. In fact with Webstudio we took the keyboard accessibility very seriously, still A LOT to improve. Visual development is a mixture of mouse and keyboard. Some things are faster with the mouse, some with the keyboard. The reason some people prefer mouse is not just that they are used to, even though it is true. Its because they know how to be efficient with it very well. "code is like that but on steroids" - again it can be true in certain use cases, but there is a massive amount of use cases where this is not actually true. Most of them are around layouts, styling and configuring components. Visual development is basically declarative programming - its configuring things. We are actually thinking deeply about the gap between typing and visually manipulating stuff at Webstudio and the plan is to allow a lot of the same UX patterns that you have with text-based coding: copy/pasting things like styles, box shadows, gradients, instances of components etc. Ability to paste gradients is already there, box shadows comes soon. Writing component code inline will most likely come at some point as well. Linked CSS editor - similar to chrome dev tools for css is also planned. As you can see there are ways to close the gap and when needed write code. The most frustrating thing with code is the build tools, compilers etc. These days nobody writes just simple html and css, things are complex. So the benefits of writing code are often completely destroyed by the amount of complexity to deploy the site.
  - danielvaughn 3y ago
    Ha, I was back-and-forth on editing a response to my own comment with a caveat - there are indeed times when I've found UI editing to be more efficient. There are probably a lot of factors that go into it, but the main one I've noticed is when there are a lot of concrete values that are both numerous and difficult to know ahead of time. An extreme example is a squiggly line in SVG. Click on a canvas and drag, super easy. Or try typing it out and discover your inner masochist. So, I definitely see your perspective, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
    - veidr 3y ago
      I really enjoyed this back-and-forth -- so much that I agreed with all of the comments on both sides, as I read them! (Not an intellectually consistent position, I admit.)
lf-non 3y ago
As someone who transitioned from flash to webdev a decade ago, I wholeheartedly agree with this. A lot of folks who started their careers with current state of webdev workflows don't fully understand how amazing a fully integrated design solution that generates production ready artifacts (while retaining programmability) can be. Thank you for succinctly summarizing this - I couldn't have done it better.

danielvaughn 3y ago

Totally reasonable response, and thanks for taking the criticism well - I hope it didn't come off as too harsh. I mostly agree with everything you wrote, just one thing I'd say: Designers may be used to visual tools, but IMO it's a hangup. It's like someone telling you that they find it easier to click File > Copy > File > Paste because they're not used to typing "ctrl c > ctrl v". I get the psychology of it, but it's objectively wrong - a keyboard shortcut will always be more efficient and everyone who learns them is better off for it. Code is like that but on steroids. If there's an efficiency gap then it's an issue with dev tooling (which IMO is 100% true in lots of cases), not inherently with code.

oleg009 3y ago
Here again you show lack of nuance. Pro webflow developers use keyboard a lot. In fact with Webstudio we took the keyboard accessibility very seriously, still A LOT to improve. Visual development is a mixture of mouse and keyboard. Some things are faster with the mouse, some with the keyboard. The reason some people prefer mouse is not just that they are used to, even though it is true. Its because they know how to be efficient with it very well. "code is like that but on steroids" - again it can be true in certain use cases, but there is a massive amount of use cases where this is not actually true. Most of them are around layouts, styling and configuring components. Visual development is basically declarative programming - its configuring things. We are actually thinking deeply about the gap between typing and visually manipulating stuff at Webstudio and the plan is to allow a lot of the same UX patterns that you have with text-based coding: copy/pasting things like styles, box shadows, gradients, instances of components etc. Ability to paste gradients is already there, box shadows comes soon. Writing component code inline will most likely come at some point as well. Linked CSS editor - similar to chrome dev tools for css is also planned. As you can see there are ways to close the gap and when needed write code. The most frustrating thing with code is the build tools, compilers etc. These days nobody writes just simple html and css, things are complex. So the benefits of writing code are often completely destroyed by the amount of complexity to deploy the site.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  Ha, I was back-and-forth on editing a response to my own comment with a caveat - there are indeed times when I've found UI editing to be more efficient. There are probably a lot of factors that go into it, but the main one I've noticed is when there are a lot of concrete values that are both numerous and difficult to know ahead of time. An extreme example is a squiggly line in SVG. Click on a canvas and drag, super easy. Or try typing it out and discover your inner masochist. So, I definitely see your perspective, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
  - veidr 3y ago
    I really enjoyed this back-and-forth -- so much that I agreed with all of the comments on both sides, as I read them! (Not an intellectually consistent position, I admit.)

lf-non 3y ago

As someone who transitioned from flash to webdev a decade ago, I wholeheartedly agree with this. A lot of folks who started their careers with current state of webdev workflows don't fully understand how amazing a fully integrated design solution that generates production ready artifacts (while retaining programmability) can be. Thank you for succinctly summarizing this - I couldn't have done it better.