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Again I would like to ask here on meta if the following question may be asked on Programmer. I would open as follow:

Have a look to the following two way of expressing a concept. One is visual and the other one is ASP.NET code. Which is more intuitive and readable? We could define readability like the activity of brain needed to understand something.. I guess the textual code is not always very readable. Especially it can be readable for one control, but not for the whole structure.

And also why it should be black or white? A visual comment (like an image could help a lot). Who stated that the code has to be written inside pure text files?

Software Engineering specify that readability is an important property of code. Of course I know very well what happens by a visual development as provided by Frontpage (for example).

But on the other extreme I see the opposite trade off. IDE are going more and more toward the disuse of the graphical part. Why don't look for an intermediate solution?

Are there solutions which allows for a strong visual editing of a cshtml page?

enter image description here

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    there are already couple questions like this, closest seems to be this one: "software is still written as lines of text... I've yet to see any innovation in visual representation of code". Another question and yet another one also seem to cover related topics
    – gnat
    Sep 26, 2014 at 8:41
  • @gnat: thanks, I will have a look!
    – Revious
    Sep 26, 2014 at 9:38
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    (+1) Important question, how to describe a solution using either "text programming" or "visual programming". Many people use one or another, a few, may use both ...
    – umlcat
    Oct 10, 2014 at 20:28

2 Answers 2

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Which is more intuitive and readable?

That is a mostly opinion based question. In short: a non-text representation is usually more intuitive, but hides details. Whether to prefer the abstraction of GUIs or the power of seeing all details at once is a trade-off that everyone has to solve for him- or herself.

Of course I know very well what happens by a visual development as provided by Frontpage (for example).

I don't.

Are there solutions which allows for a strong visual editing of a cshtml page?

That is asking for a software recommendation which is off topic on Programmers.

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  • You addressed the wrong question(s). The OP has merely asked whether the cited question would be appropriate on Programmers. (If the OP wanted an answer to the actual, cited question within the question, he shouldn't have asked on Meta!)
    – stakx
    Oct 12, 2014 at 11:59
  • @stakx I did answer OP's question, by pointing out how the cited question is (a) primarily opinion-based and (b) off topic, as it's asking for software recommendations. I added a bit of explanation on why the question is opinion-based, which ended up being half an answer to the cited question. Although I didn't spell it out very explicitly, OP seems to have understood that this question isn't suitable for Programmers.se. Considering all of that: do you have any concrete advice on improving this answer?
    – amon
    Oct 12, 2014 at 12:33
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This sounds like the germ of a blog post or magazine article proposing a new form of editing and storing annotated source code. Please go ahead and post it on a good blog hosting site, or even better, build a prototype (!). But, in my humble opinion, it does not fit the Stack Exchange format, as you are provoking your readers to suggest a whole bunch of UI solutions that might help them, or you, write and maintain code more successfully, rather than to provide a specific answer. Big thanks to gnat for linking several apparently duplicate but more specific questions.

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