Is CSS the new Photoshop?
Monday, June 28, 2010 at 9:47AM Shawn Blanc here suggests that CSS is the new Photoshop and points to some great examples. I argue that CSS is not the new Photoshop. CSS and HTML5 and Javascript together form the new PostScript. What PostScript was for desktop publishing, CSS, HTML5, and Javascript are for the modern web page. What is missing is the new PageMaker.
Most people don't know much about PostScript except maybe that it was Adobe's first product. The founders of Adobe wrote this powerful graphic programming language to describe pages for printers. Their first customer was Apple. PostScript was used as the page description language for Apple's first laser printer. It enabled the desktop publishing revolution by becoming the lingua franca of printers and publishing systems. Very few people directly wrote PostScript. (I did, but that is another story.) It was usually generated by publishing applications like PageMaker or Quark. It was also generated by print drivers on Mac, Windows and Unix. In those days, mostly programmers who wrote printer drivers wrote PostScript code. The point here is that designers did their layout by drawing and moving objects on a screen, not by writing code.
CSS, HTML5, and Javascript combine to form the way to describe pages on modern browsers much like PostScript was the way to describe pages on printers. In some cases PostScript was even used to drive displays. Steve Jobs licensed Display PostScript from Adobe as the display language for the NeXT computer before he returned to Apple.
What is missing today is the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and Javascript. Designers and artists should not need to directly write code to express art or layout. I suspect that many are working in this area. Any day now, I'm hoping that someone or some company will start to release products that bridge this huge gap.
Part of the problem is how to make a tool that will have the universal appeal of a PageMaker or Illustrator. Those applications were massively popular because of how well they solved the problems of laying out a page and drawing in vectors. Given the broad and somewhat disjointed characteristics of CSS, HTML5, and Javascript, coming up with a UI to rule them all is a big opportunity for UI gurus. How to make the result efficient enough to be useful in a production environment represents a significant programming challenge.
Adobe is the most likely to succeed in this if they can figure out how to market such a thing without undercutting Flash. Apple may also do something here.
Reader Comments (13)
There is a tool called Stylizer that seems to be part of the solution http://www.skybound.ca/stylizer/details/
The biggest issue is rendering between different browsers. The time is fast approaching where the browser game may be moot, but we're still probably a year or 2 away from that as IE9 approaches release and hopefully adoption by current IE users.
“What is missing today is the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and Javascript. Designers and artists should not need to directly write code to express art or layout.” — Softpress’s Freeway Pro has been the “modern-day equivalent” for many years (and no, I have no affiliation).
This idea is so wrong. Art doesn't just refer to the visual side of things. Writing good, clean markup is also an art itself. Your suggestion is just like building a site in Dreamweaver Design view or iWeb. The sites may look fine visually, but once you take a look at their codes, it's horrible. Nowadays, many people who have a slight knowledge in Photoshop and HTML and has built a website for their cat or bestfriend have the nerve to call themselves "designers". And this is the exact same reason why.
Now, reading your article, I'd have to say that you, as Jeffrey Zeldman says it, are someone who lacks understanding of the professionalism, wisdom, and experience required to create good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I do agree with Zeldman that "The very assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding of the professionalism"— good code needs more. However, lately, there are tools out there like jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 that can create "equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and Javascript.". I am building something like this at http://www.typefolly.com/
Its not perfect, still in beta, but it can give more control and flexibility to your work. You can easily create a CSS compliant code and markup in a similar way of using Photoshop is just few minutes without "blind" codding your way trough CSS.
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