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I kind of agree. I can't imagine it being popular with professional web developers or designers. Working with modern HTML and CSS is fairly straightforward and quick for development. I see sorting out edge cases and bugs produced by code in Macaw would leave you better off writing the code from scratch. Plus, like you said, this has the benefit of being educational and transferring over to other work. I also can't see it being accepted by people trying to get a simple site online for their mom and pop shop. Tools like WordPress are much better suited to their needs, and they can click a few buttons, get a theme, website, and CMS working in minutes. What I would like to see is a tool to mockup changes to existing websites. For example, I enter a URL, and I can quickly drag and drop elements to different locations, adjust margins, widths, colors with a proper color picker, etc. I find I'm always using Firebug to try out style changes, but it's a little sluggish to constantly select elements, and manually modify CSS properties. Using an online app that's a little more interactive would be useful, and it doesn't need to produce proper code, since I'm only using it to visually see if these are changes I want to implement or not. For example, I enter the URL to HN. I click the orange bar at the top, color pick it to green. Click the link headings, change them to bold red text, and slide up the line-height to add more spacing. I hit save, and it gives me a URL like jsfiddle that I can share with others. I can then post this to HN, and say, 'hey, what do you think of these changes to the HN layout?'. It's a quick way for multiple people to share ideas on improving an existing design, or users to share their suggestions with developers. It would be great for meetings too. Let's drag our left column a little bigger, maybe scale these heading down a bit, and drag our logo over here. Yep, that looks a little better, have the development team code those change up and push it live. |