Re: wysiwyg

On Monday 18 February 2008 3:35:54 pm Rob Shinn wrote:
> Am I the only person who thinks that designing pages by writing HTML code
> isn't all that difficult, and in fact, in many ways is a ton easier than
> using a visual tool?  Especially using Quanta, which makes Web design much,
> much simpler by automating most of the grunt work.

It's worth noting that I don't use it because it always required the last 10% 
or so to be hand tweaked and it usually destroyed any sane formatting and 
decisions I'd made. By the time we were introducing it I found that it was 
far simpler to use PHP includes because of "design drift" that was inevitable 
if you had to rely on drawing everything over and over... So it was of little 
use as it exists today in my book. After all, why create a hokey web site for 
the sake of cherishing ignorance? I just wanted to enable and welcome more 
people and hope that if nothing else I helped to insure a W3C compliant web 
that remains open for the future.

If I had a visual tool I could look at a rendered page with and visually edit 
that rendered page having it propagate back to the relevent files and 
underlying code and commit changes consistent with my pattern of design... 
That I would really like. 

In my opinion pure visual design is dead because it currently limits any real 
automation. In my opinion advances in automation that eliminate drudge work 
and possibly incorporate some visual element editing are the way of the 
future. Automation enhancements ought to enable:
1) developers to apply their pattern of development
2) implementation in an evolutionary manner that does not require current 
sites be overhauled and production be halted
3) usage models from slight input to complete design model so that developers 
can chose what works now and change it later without penalty

This is the base criteria for object templates with automation and conflict 
resolution that I hope to be able to offer in around a year. Hopefully at 
that time we will be able to look at some sort of visual tool to work in the 
mix.

I'm used to people not really understanding ideas I explain as they can be 
quite involved and have taken me years to formulate. It's easier to say "if 
you like Quanta now, wait until you see what we do with it in the future". 
Now that Quanta is so competent we can focus on truly creative ideas.

-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module