> Frankly, raw HTML and CSS is already a dying path. If you get someone to build a simple web page from scratch, it won't feel like a "real thing" to them. Because, today, "real" now means it has social sharing, interactivity, and a certain level of visual polish your web page will lack.
Social sharing, interactivity, and reasonable-to-high levels of visual polish were all frequent features presented with raw HTML/CSS a decade ago. If you have a decent designer available to you, some of them can hand you a quality original screen design in an day or less in a PSD/Illustrator/whatever file, and it's possible for most cases to convert it to HTML/CSS from scratch in about the same time (at least, it was for me by the time I'd done a hundred or two of them). Responsive may add time depending on the layout conception. All of this can work pretty much the same today.
If you don't have a good designer and/or design isn't going to distinguish you (or you want the benefits from fitting into widely-present framework styles), a template or framework can make a lot of sense. But that's a different proposition from saying HTML/CSS is a dying path.
Interactivity & Sharing: up to a certain point, interactivity via progressive enhancement costs no more time/effort than application-centric approaches unless you're truly building an application over a hypertext document with some added features. Possibly less. Social sharing is usually a matter of dropping the right widget into a page.
> Forcing them to start with an empty notepad document is like getting someone interested in cooking by making them grow wheat.
It's more like having people start with buying/using their own staples instead of a meal kits or deli meals. The latter can be delicious and convenient, but it doesn't mean the staples aren't a viable path.
Working with a good designer that knows HTML+CSS is amazing. It is lovely to get delivered working responsive HTML documents to convert into the web site or web app compared to getting delivered photoshop/illustrator files. Apart from anything else a designer that knows HTML+CSS produces designs that actually work on the web. Designers that only know photoshop/illustrator invariably produce unworkable designs.
Agreed. Of course, even if you do get PSD/Illustrator files, the designer should at least make it easy to get the necessary information required to build the page, extract assets, etc. Seen way too many non web designers just hand developers a flat picture with no way of getting the font styles or extracting images and expecting them to just guess.
It's also nice when the designer actually works to a style guide and designs things with a grid in mind rather than some sort of abstract art where even the basic text sizes seem to change on a block by block basis.
hell, I'd be happy if the designers I work with used XD instead of PS or AI so that they at least had a change of reasoning about their "responsive" layouts.
Being handed a PSD for "desktop" and a PSD for "mobile" one time is one time too many. Especially when they put fixed height elements for dynamic content everywhere and get surprised once the dynamic content starts doing its dynamic things
UX/Product Designers that are using photoshop or illustrator to deliver a full page designs are wasting everybody's time.
They should learn Sketch, InVision Studio or XD.
Agreed wholeheartedly. The whole concept of a graphic designer creating static images of layouts, which are then translated into code by a programmer, should die in fire. It's just another instance of nontechnical people writing specs for applications and having programmers translate them into code. UI/UX design is not graphic design or programming. It is both and neither.
I could not agree more. Iteration time is shortened and I usually get better results faster with a designer that can write HTML + CSS. It's really hard to work differently now.
The product I'm working on just happens to rely on WebRTC, and this means that we can use the tremendous facilities provided by WebRTC-era browsers.
Except in extreme cases (2-20MiB SPAs), the frameworks save very little labour on a decent modern browser. Furthermore, the frameworks will distance you from the subtleties that make the difference between a polished application, and a document desperately hoping to be seen as an application. I can't tell you how many times I've interacted with an application and thought it would be infinitely better if some of the elements had "user-select: none" or "user-drag: none".
> Social sharing, interactivity, and reasonable-to-high levels of visual polish were all frequent features presented with raw HTML/CSS a decade ago.
You and I lived in a very different decade.
>If you have a decent designer available to you, some of them can hand you a quality original screen design in an day or less in a PSD/Illustrator/whatever file, and it's possible for most cases to convert it to HTML/CSS from scratch in about the same time
So, let me unwind this:
- if you have a designer
- some of them can give you some design
- it's possible for most cases to convert them to HTML/CSS from scratch
- responsive may add time
That's a lot of ifs and probabilities and outright unsubstantiated assumptions.
Hence. A decade ago, when frameworks were few and far in between, there were fewer "polished" websites than today just because it's exceptionally hard to create something polished in HTML/CSS. Also, decade ago is 2009. So, no flexbox, no grid, incompatibilities in box models, etc. etc. etc.
Most Wordpress-driven websites these days are essentially temporary marketing assets. You can use Wordpress to build a site that'll be online for a decade, and people have done, but the overwhelming majority of websites don't last more than a couple of years. Using a platform that doesn't lend itself to long-term stability is fine in that use case.
Social sharing, interactivity, and reasonable-to-high levels of visual polish were all frequent features presented with raw HTML/CSS a decade ago. If you have a decent designer available to you, some of them can hand you a quality original screen design in an day or less in a PSD/Illustrator/whatever file, and it's possible for most cases to convert it to HTML/CSS from scratch in about the same time (at least, it was for me by the time I'd done a hundred or two of them). Responsive may add time depending on the layout conception. All of this can work pretty much the same today.
If you don't have a good designer and/or design isn't going to distinguish you (or you want the benefits from fitting into widely-present framework styles), a template or framework can make a lot of sense. But that's a different proposition from saying HTML/CSS is a dying path.
Interactivity & Sharing: up to a certain point, interactivity via progressive enhancement costs no more time/effort than application-centric approaches unless you're truly building an application over a hypertext document with some added features. Possibly less. Social sharing is usually a matter of dropping the right widget into a page.
> Forcing them to start with an empty notepad document is like getting someone interested in cooking by making them grow wheat.
It's more like having people start with buying/using their own staples instead of a meal kits or deli meals. The latter can be delicious and convenient, but it doesn't mean the staples aren't a viable path.