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I certainly agree that developer tools hopping along will make the situation bearable. I don't have any problems with the output being hackish, as long as my continuous interventions, debugging and headaches are not necessary for it to work.
For what it's worth, Qt's solution is cool enough. You could lay out the entire interface programmatically and it wouldn't hurt nearly as much as doing the same thing with CSS.
The problem, as I see it, is simply that HTML, CSS and to some extent JS were simply not made with web apps in mind. CSS is a great document layout language, but it will require a hefty amount of tools before making an ergonomic, familiar and good-looking interface for an application will be at least as painless as doing the same thing on the desktop was about ten years ago.
Edit: However, I do believe part of the problems lay in the technology and not just in the crude development tools. Anyone remembers Motif? It used to have a set of reasonably good development tools (they weren't free, they were expensive as hell, but they did exist). Working with Motif still made me sad sometimes.
Edited 2009-07-15 22:00 UTC




Member since:
2006-07-26
Couldn't agree more.
The problem is that the web wasn't made for application deployment, so Java, Flash, and Silverlight came in.
Creating layouts in desktop apps is easy. Java has Matisse, QT has Designer. I wonder how many hacks are used in Facebook to create that "Start Menu" type thing that always stays at the bottom left of the viewable screen. I'm sure the answer is "way more than should be needed".
That said, I do agree with the first reply to this message. Wait for dev tools. I'm sure all those desktop apps are doing complicated hacks behind the scenes, its just transparent to the developer.
The problem with dev tools for the web is that you'll always be able to look at the output and critisize it. Google has some tools with the GWT, but people will look at the results and say that its worse than what FrontPage spits out. Nobody is digging into GTK, .NET, or QT to see all the hoops they're jumping through becuase nobody looks at their final object file. People will look at their .js, .html, .css files.