[maven29]

Are modern-day "no code" tools like Webflow not an acceptable equivalent?

We already lost any semblence of building from scratch in the mid-2000s with the emergence of gargantuan HTML templates and Wordpress/Drupal/PHPbb deployments with plugins and themes.

This is a direct result of people being held to higher standards and thus spending a lot more effort overriding the compositional and behaviour defaults of the user agent.

The modern-day iteration just optimizes for scaling up to tens of thousands of concurrent end-users on anemic hardware.

We have to accept the fact that personal webpages gave way to social network profile pages. This didn't happen overnight and there is zero demand for a hand-crafted presence on the web anymore.

[kragen]

No, an environment for writing new code is not any kind of equivalent for the ability to reverse-engineer existing code. Firebug and its clones are a much closer equivalent than anything like WebFLow.

[rektide]

Build from scratch is out of favor, but not necessarily that far off. Folks like Github & Youtube have very simple bottom-up webcomponent systems they use, rather than top doen frameworks. Existing concerns about bundling might be met by bundled http exchamges (webpackage).

I dont think "no code" is an aid. If anything it's pushing in the opposite direction: rather than a transparent approachable web medium, it suggests we need hyperadvanced tools that we really wont understand or have control over to synthesize web code. It's a simpler user experience, but a push away from notepad.exe webdev.

I wouldnt rush to make any conclusions about who or what has won, as a settled fact & case for all time. We havent had good ways to run online systems ourselves, versus hosted for us, and there's still lightyears to go but we're doing good things & finally maturing well. We're only a couple years into ActivityPub as an interchange format & growing many of the caoabilities & tools & systems, around all mimds of use cases, that will make throwong together a fair, interactabke competitive offering possoble. Social media has had huge huge investmemt poured into it, but we are in decent preteen years of growing up & owning the libre equivalents. We can assess demamd only after there is a visualizable state people can imagine; just having an isolated blog is not the equivalent to the well connected social media site, but these capabilities slowly arise. Follow the alpha geeks; this currently long phase will not be forever.