[karmakaze]

Pagedraw looks very polished. I can take some wild guesses why it didn't succeed but glad to have it live on as open source.

My best guess would be that it either did too much or not enough. Getting an extra developer's worth of productivity from a tool is great but there could be other ways to make gains as noted in the shutdown page. Visual editing is a different way of programming and can be more or less productive depending on specifics. I recall doing some IBM DirectTalk voice/telephony app dev using a visual flow editor--it was the worst. There are of course success stories like the original Visual Basic 1.0. Xcode and autolayout is less productive but more expressive.

On the doing less side, are there tools for parsing/editing/outputting HTML+CSS rather than a full React integration? I've worked with designers that used Figma or Zeplin but we only tended to export the graphics and copy/paste the styles.

[gablg1]

Here's a postmortem-ish https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui...

[teleclimber]

> On the doing less side, are there tools for parsing/editing/outputting HTML+CSS rather than a full React integration?

I worked on a thing like that for a long time. I wasn't trying to "draw" HTML and CSS, but rather I wanted a way of building rich and structured content in a natural and visual interface without sacrificing control of the markup. I ended up bogged down because little by little it tried to be a design tool, and I ended up with a complex project that doesn't do any one thing very well.

It's on the back-burner for now, and it may end up open source. Link below:

http://www.cicerone.co

[orarbel1]

Yes, there are tools that output plain HTML/CSS.

For example, we (Anima - YC S18) are doing it (https://www.animaapp.com)

[catchmeifyoucan]

are there tools for parsing/editing/outputting HTML+CSS? Yes!

Creator of Airppt here -> https://airpptx.github.io

Drag and drop a UI in powerpoint with your layout, and poof, you get a UI in HTML/CSS. Don't try anything too complex or fancy, and take a look at the limitations.

I haven't published on Show HN yet, still a work in progress - but a side hobby of mine