Nice extension, it may be worth in the readme explaining how it’s different to https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-livepreview which has been around for a long time and maintained by Microsoft.
Many of Microsoft's extensions are closed source. This one does not appear to be, but MS has been known to replace open source VS Code extensions with closed source ones in the past.
Are we trying to reinvent web development? Last few years have been wild. We abandoned HTML CSS and JS websites that used to work just fine and ran after frontend component frameworks and now the circle is getting completed by building tools and extensions we had 20 yrs ago
Oh I think it is very much "just fine", but people have requirements which make things too complicated. I find it way harder to work in a React app than a few .html and .js files. TypeScript's cool though.
Most people working professionally as web developers have limited ability to reduce the requirements and have to implement what their company ask for. At that point having something to manage the complexity is much better than not.
Bullshit. jQuery as a library didn't inherently cause spaghetti code, it was predominantly just used as a cross-browser selector function and some standard library augmentation/fixes before JS itself caught up. Sprinkles of progressive enhancement jQuery were exactly the problem that caused frameworks to be created. Sprinkles of vanilla JS lead to the exact same outcome, minus a jQuery library load.
No amount of discipline was going to make medium-large websites maintainable back then. Today it's actually possible if the creators know what they're doing. Tooling isn't going to prevent people from doing stupid things.
I agree with HTML+CSS+JS websites being not fine. But to be honest, js callbacks are more of a language thing than a framework thing. You don't need to use frameworks to write promises.
You can't reuse pieces of UI functionality (a bundle of specific html, css and js) unless did copypasta which is obviously awful. Sharing business logic across different areas of an application becomes much harder and you can't non-trivially write and run tests across areas of your application because you are just using html,css and js. And the big monster: state. Sharing state safely across different areas of an application becomes much harder. You end up writing your own micro framework trying to make all the above work. At that point you might as well use as existing battle-tested one
it absolutely was fine. it was easy and many children were able to do it with minimal experience. the reason frameworks were invented was because the web devs at big tech companies decided to use dumb and sluggish hacks to simulate features that websites never did and still don't need.
This. A not so great analogy is you can always drop a single php file into your /var/www/ (or even do cgi) and get your "dynamic" website running like decades ago, but people don't do that any more for any website that is not a tiny one with just a few pages (barring famous exceptions like WordPress). People realize there are good reasons to use frameworks, and often, use other languages for website backend.
Let's be honest. Those old HTML+CSS+JS didn't have the interaction levels of modern applications. And jQuery was great until you reached a level of complexity after which it became jquery Bolognese. There are 2 main challenges: state and reusing pieces of html. Both of these are much harder in modern applications due to their complexity. Try reusing a piece of HTML using HTML+CSS+JS alone (no Node or back-end tools allowed). Try keeping state synced across a modern application without using state management libraries.
Most "applications" I visit in my browser have no business being an application. The "clear search history" button in my start menu has no business loading a React environment with three redirects either.
Some web applications need a boatload of frontend stuff to make them usable, but I rarely encounter websites that warrant such overkill. A payslip/email subscription/car rental website with a profile page and maybe three forms I can possibly need to submit doesn't need to be a fully interactive application with loading bars and offline support, leave that stuff for the websites I visit more than once a month.
At this point React/Vue/Svelte devs are probably cheaper to hire than basic JS devs, but technology wise the amount of Javascript my browser needs to load for the most basic interactions is mind-boggling. More than the "this meeting could've been an email" meetings, I run into "this web application could've been a POST request" web pages.
There are complex reasons behind my development of this. To be honest, I don’t think the editing functionality of this tool is particularly useful. I believe the real-time preview and element selection features are the ones that offer broader utility. I am considering making the editing feature disabled by default and allowing it to be enabled through settings in the future.
I don’t think it was meant to criticize your work :)
It’s just fun to see that we (here : you) are reinventing tools that everyone used 20 or 30 years ago.
I remember making my first websites in Dreamweaver. I remember it being hated by "pro" developers but this plus an FTP client (which was integrated IIRC) was enough for teenager me to be live on the internet.
Nah, I went from jquery to Backbone, Angular, and React. I don't miss jquery, and I like the functional/declarative APIs of JSX. It's a lot like just writing HTML, and CSS, and I still write plenty of JS as pure functions or plain objects, and they're lovely to test.
I don't really see the purpose of the OP when I have vite and subsecond rerenders.
I'm not really a frontend dev, but React (w/ JSX, and w/o Redux or whatever) is the only web thing I've ever used that made sense. Everything else like CSS, Angular, and jquery made me go "wtf."
The terminal is iTerm2, but the basic Mac terminal or common Linux ones can do opacity too. Didn't go out of my way to set up auto-reload, so idk how to do it in general, but the default create-react-app dev setup does it.
I was expecting something more like WYSIWYG editor, that actually edits HTML visually in real-time. Something akin to old times of first webpage editors.
Wait till you hear about Typescript, you know adding types to ECMAScript, like Macromedia did some 20 years ago. :)
Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations.
At work I often encounter a resistance to a tech or solution I propose, because "there hasen't been any substational contribution to the repository in a week, seems dead to me". To which I kindly respond with a question - how do you calculate hypotenuse, because it's been a long time since Pythagoras made the last commit.
Meanwhile, some of my friends are still doing side jobs using CakePHP, 20 years later. :)
Careless bastard. If safety wasn't his concern he at least should have written it with style using NextJS with tRPC using React Server Side components hydrated on the fly with edge locations in mind utilizing streaming components backed by Drizzle ORM further cemented by AuthJS. I'm sure there would have been plenty of starter kits had he tried npm create.
Today I value web stuff for one thing and one thing only: they run in the best sandbox we have. I can run untrusted programs from hackernews folks without worrying! I wouldn't do that with native code of course, way too easy to hack me. But they won't waste a browser 0-day on random HN readers... Whatever can be done in the web, I usually like to do it there as no-body has to trust my code then.
> I can run untrusted programs from hackernews folks without worrying
The assumption is that native code has virtually unrestricted access to your system while JS programs don't, which is true. But if the untrusted JS program is wrapped up in web extension, in 2024, it could do almost as much damage than native code especially since most non-techies don't have much of value in their machines. The value exists on walled sites
> Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations.
I think the framing here is unfair.
It's not that the people innovating in JS or HTML think what they're doing is "revolutionary" or has never been done before. Generally they are applying ideas that have been developed elsewhere, but are currently lacking in whatever their specific area is.
(1) Some time ago I'm at a coding interview and I'm tasked with an algorithm to calculate the biggest rectangle you can make of a set of segments. Or something similar. I'm presented with a computer, with VSCode, with an open file with some code already. I left my chair, approached the whiteboard available in the room and started thinking about how to address the problem. The interviewer was not pleased with my approach and eventually after I exchange my thought process he invited me back to the computer, asked to write some code, and when he saw I was doing for loops with vars he interrupted me, pointed at the beginning of the file which was "import lodash" and showed me the expected solution. A lot of functional mambo jumbo which was obviously very sexy at that time.
I looked at his code and asked him what's the computional complexity of his solution. He looked at the code, thought for a minute and said the session is over.
(2) About that time I was doing a web app that was a huge web form. The user could exit and resume a session at any given time so the input was stored in database and was supposed to be retrieved when the session resumed.
At one point I noticed that the initial loading time was noticeably slower, and after inspection it turned out that the init time raised from zero to about 800ms. It was the same time when our senior JS programmer with 9 years of experience shipped the code that was responsible for retrival of the data from the backend.
It was functional masterpiece. No loops, lots of map and reduce and he was very proud of it.
When I pointed out it had O(N^6) complexity and could be fixed with a simple for loop matching ids he got offended and stated that "we don't program that way anymore, functional is the future".
I'm glad to have mostly avoided frontend dev, but we've also had some bonkers backend trends like SOAP. It was like closing your eyes and wishing for a full-stack impl to appear if you write enough XML.
Actually, one of the things I miss the most from AS is... E4X.
I work with ton of json, including hundreds of kubernetes definitions per project, and I really miss the ability to parse the data so swiftly and effective with native syntax.
I've never used E4X, but it at least looks like it'd make XML more tolerable.
Most XML experience I had was ejabberd and XMPP. Was thoroughly pissed off by the end of it. We ended up sending JSON over IQ messages instead because we were super done with XML, only to find that iOS's XML parser takes O(N^2) time to parse each element. Had to split the elements to make it work. 0/10 would not recommend.
A few gigs ago I joined a BigCo as a part of contractor group to build a new project. The BigCo had a staff member to bootstrap the project and build a prototype which was internally reviewed and approved. When we put our foots on the ground it was already settled that the app will be build with X, Y and Z as the core components.
Two months later that staff member left the BigCo for another organization, and when we found the actual job posting for his position the X, Y and Z were explicitly stated as nice to have for a candidate.
> how do you calculate hypotenuse, because it's been a long time since Pythagoras made the last commit.
Asinine - everything advances and needs maintenance over time, even geometry. I invite you to try building a game without using quaternions or projective (ie non-euclidean) geometry.
Edit: does hn award points based on contrariness? Or is it just that people on hn think they're super clever with their contrary point?
No one said it invalidated his theorem. They said it has been expanded upon.
Also, comparing web technologies to something as fundamental as the pythagorean theorem is reductionist and overall pretty ridiculous. Web technologies need maintenance. Proven mathematical formulas don’t.
They actually asked if I was aware what year he died.
The eponymous triangle work is just as valid as it ever was in Euclidean geometries - lot of work there. That work is just as wrong as it ever was in non-Euclidean geometries - maths is timeless like that.
> Also, comparing web technologies to something as fundamental as ...
> does hn award points based on contrariness? Or is it just that people on hn think they're super clever with their contrary point?
It’s both, and seems to be a theme here. HN generally despises the mainstream, so anything that goes against that is praised with little additional thought. A great example is the recent article about “founder mode” which is definitely one of the most idiotic contrarian things I’ve ever read, but receives heaps of upvotes every time it gets posted.
Came in to post something similar. Dreamweaver was where my pro web life began. I want the WYSIWYG idea to work, but with the complexity of responsive design with modern css, I don’t see the model working well, at least in my workflow.
I was so excited when I first discovered Dreamweaver and was gonna make so many great websites. ironically my Engineering degree program had other thoughts
Well, Visual Studio 6.0's Visual Interdev (1998) had actual browser rendering (via the Trident engine used in Internet Explorer I assume), including Java applets, which would run in the "Quick view" mode, but also amazingly in the Source [code] mode!
Mozilla Composer also existed and is the root of a lot of WSISWYG editors today because of the legacy it and others left in the HTML spec (content editable).
I do! Wow, what a flashback. I think it was formed from Mozilla's built in editor, and later on died quite quickly and was forked under a different name, which, in turn, died quickly.
We still use Dreamweaver just because you can drop well structured Word documents in and get a decent HTML document out of it. Still not found a better process really.
It seems there have been many opinions questioning why a tool for editing pure HTML is being developed now. Here is my current view on this matter:
These days, it's rare to directly handle HTML files on the frontend of web applications, and placing key elements using absolute or relative coordinates is also uncommon, so the use cases for this extension are currently quite limited.
However, it could be somewhat useful in areas where web technologies are not yet widely adopted but need to be implemented simply. When creating individual components, such as with Vue.js, the real-time preview might become valuable. It could also be helpful for building non-application content like simple landing pages.
There are so many websites downloading entire web frameworks, tens of megabytes, to display static web pages. Maybe a contact form, or a twitter embed or something. I absolutely loathe it and if these sorts of tools even slightly move the needle towards bringing back standard HTML sites, I'm so incredibly for them.
You may want to check out previewjs.com (disclaimer I'm the author) although it's unfortunately not getting much love or attention lately, my kids are using all of that.
This tool only handles files that can be treated as static HTML. Therefore, it cannot currently be applied to React implemented with JSX. However, it may be applicable to Vue component files.
Would be much more valuable if you can live-preview Sass. It is easy to guess the impact of HTML edits I am making, but guessing impact of style edits is much harder and so live preview would be more valuable.
Thanks for sharing but I don't find big differences with the currently existing "live preview" and other plug-ins. Can you explain what are the features of your Web Visual Editor? Thanks
A notable feature is the ability to synchronize code selection with visual selection in the preview. Since this extension has minimal functionality, the codebase is very small, making future expansions easy. It is designed to reflect changes made in the preview back to the code, so enhancing the editing capabilities within the preview may be beneficial in the future.
It doesn't matter if it's complex. I believe this tool can be applied if it consists of a single HTML file and the resources linked to it. If you're using Web Components, there may be some issues. JavaScript is currently disabled because it's difficult to determine its impact, but enabling it is technically very simple. If there is enough demand in the future, I will add an option to control the functionality of JavaScript.
Because I don't understand the template language used by Hugo. The syntax is weird, using features is complicated. Everytime i thinking of changing something in my site, it feels like PTSD thinking about touching that code.
If it was just html, I could modify it easily. But doing big structural changes in many html files is as painful. Visual tools, like this one should help with that.
I'd think maybe in you could do inline JavaScript. Or inline CSS. Or JavaScript urls in the links. Gosh, there are so many possibilities, makes me feel good about the architectural decisions that led to this point.
