Comment by brailsafe
7 days ago
To me, things like mobile-first responsive design and grid-based graphic design thinking are core components of designing for the web, so it's a bit wild to me that Figma, with such popularity, is just now getting grids, and as far as I'm aware no GUI tool has ever succeeded at building a capable visual responsive design tool close to on-par with just designing in the browser.
This does not seem that surprising to me.
Browsers are by and large black boxes—less because of their architecture and more because of the sheer size of the code, although Firefox, for example, seems to have been moving towards a less open architecture for most of its history as well (deCOMtamination, death of XULRunner, Quantum, etc.).
What you really want in a parametric web design tool is to crack open the layout engine and the CSS cascade and inheritance, at the very least. That’s a lot of work to target a demographic of designers and programmers who by now have largely decided to ignore CSS in favour of reinventing inline styles badly (Tailwind) and insert markup as necessary for the desired visual effect. (Is there a tool to do CSS in terms of React/etc. components, with proper cascading, custom pseudoclasses and pseudoelements and so on? I haven’t seen one.)