[nfreising]

So I spent a while on their page, https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan seems to have the best explanation how Adobe thinks you should use their product. However I still don't really see the use case:

> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.

So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).

However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.

[pornel]

This is the Dropbox for your rsync.

The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.

[nine_k]

Markdown though looks like a really constraining medium.

[michaelmrose]

Why would you want there to be a separate upload and file sync step instead of simply editing in the browser?

[mbreese]

Versioning? Publishing workflow?

People might like to pass around a draft before publishing an article. Maybe to an editor for feedback. That’s easiest done with a Word document.

Then, when you’re ready to publish, just save the file to the right location. It’s easier than opening an CMS and copying/pasting (marginally).

[yetanother12345]

> So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML.

Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML, even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA. It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a structure that you could translate with different classes of headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on prose.

Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security was like any other pure HTML site.

> I still don't see who would use this for their site.

My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just continue to use these tools.

This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.

[tambourine_man]

They probably weren't expecting the scrutiny of HN. Most pages we discuss here are now redirecting to the home page. The one you linked to included.

[user_named]

I worked in a large tech Co that used AEM for building web pages. I think one landing page took months, at least not less than one. If a content team can launch some simpler pages using this on their own, we would have definitely bought and used this.