| Here again you show lack of nuance. Pro webflow developers use keyboard a lot. In fact with Webstudio we took the keyboard accessibility very seriously, still A LOT to improve. Visual development is a mixture of mouse and keyboard. Some things are faster with the mouse, some with the keyboard. The reason some people prefer mouse is not just that they are used to, even though it is true. Its because they know how to be efficient with it very well. "code is like that but on steroids" - again it can be true in certain use cases, but there is a massive amount of use cases where this is not actually true. Most of them are around layouts, styling and configuring components.
Visual development is basically declarative programming - its configuring things. We are actually thinking deeply about the gap between typing and visually manipulating stuff at Webstudio and the plan is to allow a lot of the same UX patterns that you have with text-based coding: copy/pasting things like styles, box shadows, gradients, instances of components etc. Ability to paste gradients is already there, box shadows comes soon. Writing component code inline will most likely come at some point as well. Linked CSS editor - similar to chrome dev tools for css is also planned. As you can see there are ways to close the gap and when needed write code. The most frustrating thing with code is the build tools, compilers etc. These days nobody writes just simple html and css, things are complex. So the benefits of writing code are often completely destroyed by the amount of complexity to deploy the site. |
An extreme example is a squiggly line in SVG. Click on a canvas and drag, super easy. Or try typing it out and discover your inner masochist.
So, I definitely see your perspective, thanks for sharing your thoughts!