> having the code update itself intelligently and automatically.
That's why what the author wants is impossible. Everybody tried to make the perfect design Tool for web content starting back from Frontpage, it just never worked, not even once.
There's so much invisible pieces in web which are not related to the design. Does the markup makes sense? How does the design integrate with the features (web isn't static print at all). How does the code renders on non-standard screen sizes? Is the code generated maintainable and readable for future use? Is there a right balance between design and loading time?
The core issue is that if you would provide all the features in a software that the code provides, it would be more complicated than learning coding itself. That's also why nothing replaced a text-editor to code after all these years. If you would invent something to replace it, it would be more complicated than directly learning to code.
FrontPage and other early content management systems were never trying to make the perfect design tool. They were trying to make web authoring as easy as Word. And in that, they did work. (My first startup was doing content tools in those days, and we did very well up until the dotcom crash.)
The problem is that it is difficult to serve both purposes - ease for content authors isn't the same UX as ease for designers. And the effort to write good underlying code no matter what insanity the users do is a hard problem. I don't feel that it is an impossible task... just a hard one, and there isn't enough business need for such a tool that anyone has made a go of it.
> That's also why nothing replaced a text-editor to code after all these years.
Have you ever used anything like Flash Designer? Because that was better than using a text editor for making flash programs. There are plenty of design tools in existence. It's just that the web ones never caught on in mass.
The core issue is that if you would provide all the features in a software that the code provides, it would be more complicated than learning coding itself.
After using a lot of different dev tools, I disagree. There are orders of magnitude easier environments than others.
That's why what the author wants is impossible. Everybody tried to make the perfect design Tool for web content starting back from Frontpage, it just never worked, not even once.
There's so much invisible pieces in web which are not related to the design. Does the markup makes sense? How does the design integrate with the features (web isn't static print at all). How does the code renders on non-standard screen sizes? Is the code generated maintainable and readable for future use? Is there a right balance between design and loading time?
The core issue is that if you would provide all the features in a software that the code provides, it would be more complicated than learning coding itself. That's also why nothing replaced a text-editor to code after all these years. If you would invent something to replace it, it would be more complicated than directly learning to code.