[TuringTest]

There's no reason why designers and ''layouters'' couldn't use WYSIWYG tools nor should be forced to use plain text in order to design the visuals of the site. Your argument is against letting end-users control the whole process, but it's not an argument against WYSIWYG per se.

[workhere-io]

I see what you mean. However, given the large number of different CMSes, I'm not sure designers would appreciate having to re-learn how to design every time they use a new CMS. Right now they use a relatively small "default" set of tools, with PhotoShop being the chief one.

I'm not a designer, but my feeling here is that designers wouldn't appreciate the workflow you're suggesting. Any designers here who'd like to weigh in?

[TuringTest]

That's why design tools in visual CMS should be integrated with the current methods that designers use in specialized apps :-)

Who says you can't merely reuse the same basic workflows that have been refined by professional designers, augmented with general-purpose mixed visual-textual scripting? That sounds like a winning strategy to me.

Designers ''do'' learn ad-hoc batch processing tools for image transformation and publication of the final work; having those standardized would be a net win.