Jason Santa Maria wrote a well-reasoned piece in which he laments the state of web design authoring tools. In a nut: current tools are inadequate, originally built for print design or outmoded metaphors, and each does only one or two things we really need. They are, essentially, obstacles that slow down our work and require us to spend silly amounts of money on multiple apps that, even together, don’t meet our requirements.
He’s right, and you don’t have to talk to many web folk to find this out.
By contrast, developers have seen some improvements to parts of their workflow in recent years. Coda, Espresso, and Aptana Studio all solve problems elegantly. They take a decent stab at fixing the annoying things about programming for the web, and on the whole, they do OK.
So what’s the problem with building a design app for the web?
Plainly, it’s extremely difficult, and no company with decent resources has really tried to do it (yet). But I argue that more than that, the modern web is a true Frankenstein that outwits those who might attempt to create new design tools for it. Let’s be honest — the web itself is fundamentally crap. It’s a hacked together heap of mostly incompatible parts that miraculously work decently part of the time. No wonder we don’t have good tools to build it.
To be sure, things are converging. Browsers are more robust, capable, and compatible than ever. Standards are getting better. People are bullying Flash. If ever there was a time to build such a beast, it’s now.
Still, perhaps it’s my own personal masochism, but I actually enjoy using crappy tools to build the web. Doing so requires some ingenuity and awareness of different pieces of the puzzle; it adds to the challenge and toughens us up. Maybe this should be coined the Roy Underhill principle.
If a new tool was released, I’d try it, and probably use it. But just as people don’t build computers anymore, such a tool will signal the very beginning of the time when people don’t really need to build the web anymore.
No Comments