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Create JavaScript, CSS Interactions With Zero Lines of Code

167 pointsby callmevladabout 11 years ago

21 comments

dansoabout 11 years ago
Let me preface this by saying: I have the upmost respect for the Webflow developers and designers...they&#x27;ve created a highly-functional web app with the purpose of enabling creators...the process to make such a full-featured web-browser product with such a range of capability is astounding.<p>That said, I disagree with the implication that Webflow, and similar products, solve the problems of code, e.g., the phrase &quot;Do xyz without writing a line of code&quot;. Knowledge of code does constrain non-developers, but in the end, that is not the <i>hard</i> part. To use a quick example: the mechanics of baking responsiveness into a new site from scratch is significantly easier than the conceptual process of &quot;What information and features should be prominent, or excised, in the mobile view of our website?&quot;...and in my opinion, that latter problem is something that people can get into without knowing how to write code.<p>So despite the technical strength of the Webflow product, I don&#x27;t think that it makes things easier in the end. Instead of &quot;code&quot;, a newbie has to learn a whole new interface, a whole new set of iconography&#x2F;terms (used for buttons, subheads, etc.), and last but not least, a whole new set of quirks inherent to the Webflow program. And when they become experts at this, they have spent 50-90% of their cognitive ability mastering Webflow, and the remainder understanding the creative and technical process of web development.<p>At some point, isn&#x27;t it just better to learn <i>some</i> code? Not 10 years worth, but something in between that and &quot;0 lines of code&quot;. I&#x27;ve used Webflow, and I&#x27;ll repeat again, it is an excellent web product in execution and design...but the problem it attempts to tackle is just too <i>big</i>, and the abstractions it offers may ended up hindering creators in the medium-to-long run.
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evanmoranabout 11 years ago
The most important thing to keep in mind is this is for designers not coders -- I haven&#x27;t looked at this deeply enough to know if it is good yet, but my guess is if you read hacker news comments it isn&#x27;t for you because, well, you probably code=).<p>Yes, these sorts of editors often create horrible leaky abstractions. Yes, these editors often confuse product folks into thinking that coding isn&#x27;t necessary or important or hard. But that isn&#x27;t its goal -- the goal is to make the common stuff easy to do for people writing &#x2F; designing simple site content -- fades, positional, simple triggers. There is no reason to write code for this stuff.<p>If you don&#x27;t believe me, imagine drawing something without showing the picture. Word documents without wysiwyg. Photo editing without Photoshop. In this video (<a href="http://vimeo.com/64895205" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;64895205</a>) Bret Victor brilliantly shows what a powerful interactive editor can do. For the web, no amount of manual css typing can beat what a great editor could do. Whether this is that editor remains to be seen, but the idea of editors is a good one.
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habosaabout 11 years ago
This is amazing, and I really intend to use it. I am a developer but I just suck at front-end (CSS, mostly) and I have a much easier time learning back-end stacks. I haven&#x27;t used WebFlow yet but is it fairly easy to use it to create bits and pieces to put into my entirely separate website?<p>Also for a person like me, it would be great if there was some sort of &quot;explain&quot; feature where Webflow would give me a peek at what&#x27;s going on so i could slowly learn. For example: &quot;This fade-in was achieved using the CSS3 fade animation with the following line of code: ...&quot;. I know that&#x27;s a niche feature, but I think there are a lot of design-challenged coders out there who would like it.
dangoorabout 11 years ago
Nifty looking tool!<p>The home page is missing a link to pricing. I couldn&#x27;t find pricing until clicking through to the Features page.
chrisweeklyabout 11 years ago
Sure it demos well, but it&#x27;s closed-source. Vendor lock-in sucks, full stop. And the time investment spent learning it won&#x27;t pay off bc those skills won&#x27;t carry over to the vast majority of other future projects that don&#x27;t use it.<p>Building a site on bootstrap (from source, ie integrating bootstrap&#x27;s less files as dependencies in your webapp via grunt and bower) is defensible; becoming entirely dependent on the capabilities of something like webflow, imho, is not.<p>I suppose if you&#x27;re a designer in a hurry to build a pretty, throwaway site (eg a microsite for an event) then this might be worth your while. But if you&#x27;re building something for the enterprise, anything you or your team might want to maintain and extend, I think it represents an unacceptable level of knowledge debt, to rely on site-generating tools like this.<p>YMMV of course. My views are skewed towards the UI architecture needs of a multi-million-dollar global company.<p>&#x2F;$.02
reedlawabout 11 years ago
The headling should be &quot;...without <i>writing</i> any code&quot;. Zero lines of code implies there is no generated code at all. That would be truly amazing.
azurelogicabout 11 years ago
More than half of the examples didn&#x27;t even work in my browser - Chrome 34.0.1847.116, Windows 8.
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wehadfunabout 11 years ago
So you can only make websites that are hosted in webflow. I cant send the website to my own server?
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Xdesabout 11 years ago
Not interested in SaaS unless there is an offline version. I like to own my software not rent it.
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thehmeabout 11 years ago
I tried sharing the site&#x27;s link with someone who opened it on a mobile device and was unable to see it - &quot;doesn&#x27;t work on my phone&quot;. Does this mean that a site built this way would not work on mobile devices or just not on Android devices?
CoryG89about 11 years ago
Lack of scroll animation support for touch devices seems like a deal breaker, no?
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chrismorganabout 11 years ago
Very significantly broken for me on Firefox 31 (nightly):<p>&gt; TypeError: F.timing is undefined
buckbovaabout 11 years ago
It&#x27;s a good looking product.<p>What does this offer over something like Wix or Weebly?
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Tloewaldabout 11 years ago
None of the examples worked on my ipad (gen 4). I like the idea, but it seems to me that it needs to work or at least degrade gracefully on mobile.
pjonesdotcaabout 11 years ago
Pricing missing? Why list &quot;try free for 14 days&quot; when there is no price listing?<p>That makes me question if I even want to take it for a spin.
aps-sidsabout 11 years ago
Is this different from Google Web Designer?
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gbromiosabout 11 years ago
Dreamweaver 2.0
cturhanabout 11 years ago
Scroll animation works well on windows phone 8. Seems like you didn&#x27;t count it as `touch device` :)
octatone2about 11 years ago
Inline all the styles!
pessimizerabout 11 years ago
Instead of paying somebody once to do this stuff with skrollr, you instead rent your own website from this company for the rest of your life? Good business plan for the rentier.
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evo_9about 11 years ago
Man are people that oppose to learning a little bit of coding?<p>I guess in my mind if you are that against coding maybe you should consider just sticking with design or biz development, etc? Not being mean but seriously, stick to what you are good at, right?
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