

Show HN: A drag drop webpage builder in 10k HTML/JS/CSS - nrkn
http://10k.aneventapart.com/Entry/Details/659

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spiralganglion
It's fantastic that you've tackled something so ambitious for 10k Apart. This
is a super cool project, and the outcome is fun and inspiring. But it also
offers a great benefit to me, personally. Lately, I've been heavily
considering building a drag-drop, intuitive-as-possible editor for some of the
content my company develops. I've never built such an editor before, so it's
great to see some of the design decisions you made in putting this together.

On one hand, the system you've built feels limited. It's so easy to make the
snap judgement, "Anything I could make with this tool would be trivial to code
by hand — what use is it to me?". But that's a dangerous line of thinking to
fall into, when evaluating such a tool as this. Maybe it's not supposed to be
a replacement for code. Maybe it's a fundamentally different approach to
content design.

I'll need to be mindful of this difference, when I build my editor. I'll be
compelled to dream big, to attempt to make it both simpler and more powerful
than what we can do with our hand-coded content. But it's an awful lot harder
than one may expect, to capture the general ability to design something
systematic in a very simple symbolic interface. I'd be wise to look for unique
advantages that can come from visual/spatial interaction, and not just try to
recreate the processes of coding with GUI tools.

Thank you for sharing this. Contest or not, you've made something that's
inspired at least one fellow hacker.

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nrkn
Thank you very much for your kind words. The paradigm that I have in mind is
fundamentally different to how web dev tools are usually done. This is just a
very rapid prototype of some of the most basic elements done rather crudely
but I hope it gives some idea of the direction we're going :)

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happyfeet
Nice. The part I like the most is that I liked playing around with your app to
know what it can do.

It does require changes to make it more intuitive and will be looking forward
to see how it evolves. Good luck.

~~~
nrkn
Thanks, I have a todo list longer than my arm, a lot of which is UX related.
There simply wasn't time, I expected to run out of bytes before I ran out of
time but it turns out that 10k is a _lot_ when you throw in zip compression -
especially if you're coding with the way zip compression works in mind from
the start

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yannis
Is the code open sourced? The UI needs some work and so does the css, but
overall is very good for the amount of code.

~~~
nrkn
Hi there, not at the moment but I _may_ be releasing something at some point
depending on time etc., keep an eye on <https://github.com/nrkn>

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PeterMcCanney
Bravo!

Lovely bit of work for just 10K. The only criticism I would make is about the
zoom. Not sure that the controls should enlarge as well.

Is there a betting pool where I can put a few quid on you winning the contest?

~~~
nrkn
Yeah the whole thing around that is a bit iffy, it was a compromise I made
because it's a little fiddly on very small screens (my phone) and I didn't
have time to think about it properly.

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geekytenny
I was dragging onto the grey area, i think the 'canvas-like' div should have a
min-height even if it contains nothing. What do you think?

~~~
geekytenny
Great job though..

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gavinpc
Note that you need cookies enabled for the site for the app to work.

Having said that, as Freud observed, "sometimes 10k is just 10k."

~~~
nrkn
Curious, as I didn't touch anything to do with cookies in the code. Perhaps
browsers use the user setting for allowing cookies to also allow/disallow
html5 localstorage, which the site does make use of.

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karl_nerd
Love the snapiness and complete lack of fancy animations!

~~~
nrkn
I actually had some transitions etc. but I found they made it feel slow on
anything but a desktop machine

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geuis
Very interesting. While I think there are some UI issues (a bit confusing to
figure out how to change styles initially, how to save/open needs better
explanation, etc), I believe these are simply attributed to the limited space
available to the app.

Very good job, and I would love to see this fleshed out a bit outside of the
contest.

~~~
nrkn
Thanks, definitely agree on there being some issues. I would have liked to
have spent more time on polishing it but I submitted it literally 1 minute
before the deadline. There's a link to the mailing list on the app if you want
to follow progress :)

