First, a little background. I've never been fond of WYSIWYG HTML generators because they always seem to generate unreadable HTML. This I why write HTML by hand. And you know what? It's really not that bad.
If we can keep stdgui markup simple, so that it can be easily written by hand, then many skilled developers will choose to type it instead of point-and-click with a GUI builder. What would be nice then is a tool that gives you a preview as you type. Picture this:
- User opens a stdgui markup file in his/her favorite text editor.
- User also opens same file in the stdgui-live-preview tool.
- Every time user hits save, the live-preview refreshes.
The live-preview tool could also have a built-in markup editor of it's own with basic code completion for those developers who don't yet have a favorite editor.
What I like about this approach is that:
- It gives developers a deeper understanding of how stdgui works. Deeper understanding means they won't get stuck if the GUI builder won't let them do X.
- It follows the Unix philosophy: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
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