Why Adobe Doesn’t Understand Web Designers

Maybe Web Designers Are Just Hard For Everybody To Understand?

We were amused by Why Adobe Doesn’t Understand Web Designers, a post ruminating on the failings of Adobe to woo the web design crowd crowd, provoked by its latest controversial ‘Muse’ product.

web-design-bannerYou’ll notice that the latest “easy enough for a caveman!” web design product always draws the same discussion online: First somebody moans how this is really a toy, no good for professionals. Then somebody always counters (in a snide tone) “Well this isn’t for you elitist professionals, this is so mom and dad can design web pages for their cookie business!” Yeah… but we’ve been hearing this since 1998 with Microsoft’s FrontPage Express. You know how it goes: The easiest-to-learn tool (which always has the least features) soon becomes an industry standard, at which point its user base demands more features. Then it isn’t easy to use anymore, and somebody makes another alternative… the cycle repeats.

The money quote from the article: “WYSIWYG’s shouldn’t be a way to avoid learning code, they should be a way to teach it.” Yeah, but that only makes sense on non-Earth planets. If it were as simple as “learn to code”, we wouldn’t have invented any of these tools. Humans and code appear to be mostly incompatible.