No need to code your webpage yourself, says Microsoft – draw it and our AI will do the rest Microsoft has introduced an AI-infused web design tool called Sketch2Code that converts hand-drawn webpage mockups into functional HTML markup. It's not to be confused with a similar AirBnB project that has been referred to, unofficially, as sketch2code. For years, drag-and-drop web page building apps have been capable of much …
"Put some CSS, JQuery, or Ajax in there maybe the page could be interesting irritating."
Fixed it for ya. Except CSS is ok when kept to a minimum [and not some ginormous boilerplate abomination from robot hell, stored on a CDN, and only used on THAT web page].
I can imagine how many horrible things gone horribly wrong will end up on 'teh intarwebs' as a result of an AI tool that turns drawings into web pages.
"Too often these products are marketed to PHBs who are penny wise and pound foolish."
Oh yes.I knew it was near time to retire when the new PHB told me he did not know why it took days to produce new reports when he had seen a Microsoft tool that just allowed you to drag a database query onto a web page and have it populate a table that you resized with the mouse.
Query cost analysis and optimisation? Formatting? Validation?
I do remember that, yes. And I still think it is a good thing.
Anything which lowers the barriers to non technical people creating content on the web is good. And, in my opinion, 1000 functional websites with awful code is better than 1 website, say, facebook, with 1000 beautfilly efficiently coded pages.
Front-end web jockeys, freed from the burden of applying their expertise, can look forward to the creative satisfaction of quality assurance, a phrase which here means checking the AI's work.
But don't get too comfy. You'll be on the Help Desk soon after the release of the AI product that fulfills the QA function.
But the Help Desk have all been replaced with an AI chatbot that really only knows to tell people to restart their devices.
'Turn it off and on again' /'uninstall and reinstall the app' serves two important purposes on a helpdesk.
1 it actually fixes most of the callers' problems (either because it does; it gives them sufficient pause to work out the answer themselves or it just makes them go away because they never had a problem that's in scope for that helpdesk.
2 it tells the knowledgeable caller that the operator has reached the end of their script/expertise and it is time to ask for an escalation or give up.
"there'll be a lot of web developers suddenly out of work"
That seems rather doubtful. There's a lot more to web development than just arranging the visuals. This tool seems more suitable to allow non-web developers to design simple pages, and to relieve real web developers of the tedium of designing simple pages.
"Better learn some real programming languages guys..."
It sounds like you're confusing two different professions. While there is a bit of overlap in the Venn diagram, web developers and software developers are two different skillsets that require two different ways of thinking and working. Witness how terrible most software developers are at web development. Web developers aren't wannabe software developers who couldn't be bothered to learn <insert your favorite language here>.
"There's a lot more to web development than just arranging the visuals".
Cue the old joke about the drunk searching for his car keys under the street light. "Is this where you dropped them?" "No, but it's much easier to see here".
One of the classic principles of software design: "do the easy bits first, and forget about the rest".
"there'll be a lot of web developers suddenly out of work"
That seems rather doubtful. There's a lot more to web development than just arranging the visuals.
Yes, but those "web developers" whose sole qualification is three weeks at a Web Boot Camp will be soon having to be selling off their kidneys.
"Once you have drawn these wireframes on a whiteboard..."
I look forward to receiving a web page full of blurred scribbles and smudges using a colour palette of 6 faded colours. All enhanced by a background image from the last person who tried to use a permanent marker on the whiteboard.
more likely, three colors.(at least for the actual web page, transcribed from a white board maybe)
One is light blue, for everything that's supposed to look like a button or a symbolic link.
Next, there is blisteringly blindingly bright white, for 90% of the page, to keep you from being able to see anything on it [like staring directly into the sun].
Then there's the black text, with a font size that is too small and a font weight that's too thin to be easily read without magnification, by anyone over the age of 35. Like this edit box, right here. Hint hint hint. Now, where's my magnifying glass... everything looks like "blur" on bright white here.
But what if I want to design a black website with black buttons labelled in black, which when pressed cause a little black sign to light up in black to show that you have done it? You know, for that true Haggunenon look and feel.
Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams
"But what if I want to design a black website with black buttons labelled in black, which when pressed cause a little black sign to light up in black to show that you have done it? You know, for that true Haggunenon look and feel."
Easy. Just forget to take the lens cap off when you photograph the whiteboard!
Next, there is blisteringly blindingly bright white, for 90% of the page, to keep you from being able to see anything on it [like staring directly into the sun].
I reckon there's a conspiracy among monitor manufacturers and web designers, to use as much white as possible, to decrease the useful life of the screen.
"I look forward to receiving a web page full of blurred scribbles and smudges using a colour palette of 6 faded colours. All enhanced by a background image from the last person who tried to use a permanent marker on the whiteboard."
Oh, so the same GUI designer as Windows 10?
Microsoft AI / Azure PR people or this article below from yesterday - Confused! Either way I'm sure some hilarious results will come out of this process at times. Me? No I'm not a web developer. Oh wait, I am! I'm today's web developer, a game dev! Apparently AI is going to be making hit games any day now. Watch out! Must find something else. Social media content moderator, that sounds stable, free of AI? Er, nevermind!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/28/ai_image_recognition_tricked/
Web development these days is all about dragging in pointless dependencies from NPM.
Don't forget superseding last week's must-have tool with this week's. And devising new opaque commands. I just got used to npm, then I read a book where some of the commands have to be executed as 'ng npm'. Even this is apparently too lucid, as somebody's introduced a command called 'n'.
I will bet on "a very large amount". Just try to pick up any html page and see if you can read it from source. I certainly can't. About the fourth time another javascript blob appears, I lose my focus and give up.
I have a web application online that I hand-coded. All the files involved except the images can fit in 24 KB. This includes the backend code as well, so each frontend page that could be presented is tiny. And still it has a number of features. A standard page online is much larger than my entire application.
"It is funny how all of these supposedly creative people all come up with a look and feel for sites that is almost identical."
almost identically *CRAP* design, all 2D FLAT and BRIGHT BLUE ON BLINDING WHITE.
It's like who told these guys THAT was 'good design'? Like who told cashiers to put the coins ON TOP OF THE DOLLAR BILLS and then hand the pile to you... some dim-bulb pretending to be a consultant I guess. And that answers the OTHER question, too.
@Bob
Black text on white is the most* familiar to those who grew up using pen and paper.
Blue is easy on the eyes* and a relaxing colour* because you don't want people getting angry navigating your site. Blobs of blue are also easy to spot* on a white background, which is important when the button says "Buy now"
2D flat is the visual style du jou^H^H^H decade
That being said, on any site that will give me the option, I'll have a dark grey background with white text as it's far easier on the eyes.
"Like who told cashiers to put the coins ON TOP OF THE DOLLAR BILLS and then hand the pile to you."
Please sir, please sir, I know that one!
When cash registers only added up the sales total, the sales assistant had to work out the change from the money tendered so did a backwards subtraction, ie adding to the sales total until they reached the cash tendered total so started with the smaller values, the coins and ended with the notes(s).
Modern cash registers total up the goods value then the assistant enters the amount of cash tendered and the cash register tells them how much change to give. Given that value, the sale assistant now starts with the highest denomination and works down to the smallest until the total change value is reached.
Yet another chore of daily life we can blame on computers :-)
When I worked behind a till, the reason for me to do it that way was that coins were less likely to fall between fingers and all over the floor if the note is beneath forming an impenetrable layer that holds the coin.
As a customer, it's really not hard to either pull the notes out from underneath, or just turn everything on it's side in your hand and just pick up the notes from next to the coins.
"Some people are just too fussy. I guess it's like which way do you hang your dunny paper? Some will have religious wars over it, most likely don't even care."
It should roll from the top over the front and down. Anything else is heresy. BURN THE HERETICS!!!!
(for the real purists, that first sheet should be folded into a point)
A few years ago I hand-crafted a website (that I still keep updated) with just simple displays of titles and content lists. It was a basic but presentable display. I was quite pleased it seemed to load as fast, or even faster that similar ones.
Not long ago I was chatting with a couple of guys interested in the same subject, and on showing them what I had, noticed they'd suddenly gone very quiet. It seems they were unused to being able to flick through menus so quickly.
Web design has fallen victim to fashion. The platform heels, 24" bell bottoms, ripped jeans, chains everywhere phenomenon that sacrifices practicality for looks, form over function. The next big thing will be hexagonal mug shots instead of circular, you watch. Can AI keep up with that?
Ah, yes, that would be this?
IIRC, PCW published the source code a a version of The Last One which I dutifully typed in, spent ages correcting the typos I'd made, played with for a short while, and was severely underwhelmed after all the hype. As far as I remember, it could create database systems with data entry screens, querying and reporting and that was pretty much it's limits.
In retrospect, it was impressive at the time for what it was I suppose, but still, fairly limited.
I remember something a bit more advanced and very GUI oriented some years later called Black Box which made similar claims and was equally underwhelming, if reasonably decent at what it could actually do as opposed to what the hype implied it could do. Sadly "Black Box", even with some relevant qualifiers seems to be far to generic to search Google for evidence of it's past existence.
So when a client wants to be able to update the text on their website or add a blog post, I should tell them to go learn my job instead of me providing them with a drag and drop facility?
You give them some kind of sub-content management thing so they can publish blogs posts and all with start and end dates and all sorts of clever stuff.
there is a big difference between a web designer, who maps out what the website looks like, how the thing looks and how you navigate, and a web developer who actually implements the design and makes it work.
This is aiming to remove the coding step and have a design automatically made into a site. probably ok for simple prototyping, and low volume low complexity sites, but anything that needs to be a bit more robust, will need a real developer behind it.
...and that's efficient and good SQL compared to the mess that "appears" in SharePoint. I'm pretty sure that given the level of unnecessary, snail like complexity everywhere in SharePoint that it's really gaining sentience, most likely as some denizen of hell*, rather than trying to deliver a decidelly half baked document management / workflow / CMS / website builder... thing.
* It's already consumed the souls of anybody that claims to be a SharePoint developer.
I'm wondering how well the AI will deal with "that needs to be half a pixel bigger, and more orangy", "No not orange, more orangy!", and "It looked perfect on my monitor, you ruined it!"? Though I guess given the way this works, that last one would be "back of my half used napkin" rather than "my monitor". How many web sites will we see that include a more orangy smashed avocado stain?
Long is the time I have been working in web development, and with every year that passes I become more and more isolated from the wider community. Why? I don't use a Mac, I don't grow a beard, I don't buy in to every single brand new framework that's the next big bollocks that's going to make my life easier. I get on with the task at hand, building a website to the clients needs and to deliver the best possible site I can build.
The irony though is that, from my experience, a lot of web designers etc have bought in to AI and home automation. Most of the ones I have encountered have an Alexa or Google thing where they order their Huel, have their iWatches hooked up to their phones ordering Ubers and Deliveroo. Automation, to them, has long been brilliant and a "life saver". Now though that very automation, that very AI they have bought in to and helped make popular, is now starting to take away from their jobs. The very thing they have helped do to high street stores and taxi drivers is happening to them and they don't like it.
Karma's a bitch.
Let the designers design. By designers I mean people who have a clue about visual perception, display of information, the principles of Gestalt, etc. and not those wannabes of the flat-all-is-a-shade-of-sameishness-lets-include-big-irrelevant-pictures-so-we-dont-need-to-show-information that seem to be in charge of most sites...
That said: the implementation will suck. AI is just not intelligent, and if they feed it with the carp code we see on the web today it will spit out carp code.
Who's going to be checking the code for exploits? I guess AI will be doing that too ... "AI" is Artificial Intelligence ... when was the last time anyone looked up the full meaning of "Artificial" .... looks good but that's the end of it ... it's not the real thing and never will be.
There are 3 things to note about this:
1. It's not required/useful to anyone who is competent.
2. No "visual design tool" for web pages has worked, or ever will work. The whole point is that to code something well you have to, you know, understand the code. Therefore point 1. Just write the markup yourself, properly.
3. When it comes to anything web-related, Microsoft is just not a name you trust, if you're a competent or experienced web developer. FrontPage, IE, "Online Services", horrible .NET applications... the list goes on.
Point 1 is really the clincher for me. If you need this sort of tool, you don't understand the underlying code of what you're creating. If that's the case, you shouldn't be involved in the production of any serious web site or application, end of story. Maybe invest the time in learning the appropriate skills by doing some coding, instead of fannying around with a tool the world does not require.
can this whatever-it-is, take an existing shitty inaccessible webpage, and make it accessible - and still function.
Then you may have something worthwhile.
Bet it can't.
Bet it also can't take some vague design specs and produce something which matches the CEOs approval either. You know, like us real intelligence folks have to.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
