WYSIWYG/GUI frontend editors have been around for years now, but the standard development process for frontend developers is still to crack out an IDE or text editor and write HTML/CSS by hand. For such a technical industry this seems like a strange trend - why wouldn't we leverage tools and technology to make building HTML/CSS less of a boilerplate activity?
It makes sense that it could be related to the widgetisation of frontends, with chunks of HTML appearing in different locations or as embedded JSX, but I see no reason why editors couldn't provide integration by allowing single documents to be sliced up into smaller components and kept in sync.
So, HN, what's your take on the lack of adoption of GUIs for building frontends?
Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to let the designer design whatever the hell he wants without the constraints that a more specialized app might impose. Then, let the programmer take that design and create whatever infrastructure he thinks is necessary without also constraining him to whatever a specialized app might impose.
I've been doing both design and programming a bit lately and I absolutely love apps like Subform, Webflow and Apple's interface builder. But, once I get past the fast iteration mockup phase, the structure of the app or webapp I'm making changes enough that the tools become unwieldy.
What I would really like are more robust layout APIs for both the browser and native apps. In Subform, you can define relative widths and positions both to other components and to the window itself. It's great for taking some of the tediousness out of design, but from a programming perspective, centering an object horizontally and vertically consistently is still a surprisingly difficult endeavor.