Front end design should have been all drag and drop years ago. LLMs should be doing it now. If it were not for the fact that HTML is a terrible way to encode a 2D layout, it would have been.

It was drag and drop before we decided websites should work on different screen sizes. And that it should adapt to every size more elegantly than a word document randomly changing layout when things move.

I often hear this, and to an extent I don't disagree. There is an absurd amount of complexity that goes behind CSS/JS/HTML to make it function how it does. Browsers are true monstrosities.

But what alternatives are really left behind here that you view as superior?

To me, it is obvious the entire world sees a very high value in how much power can be delivered in a tiny payload via networked JS powering an HTML/CSS app. Are there really other things that can be viewed as equally powerful to HTML which are also able to pack such an information dense punch?

HTML is a good enough way of representing a superset of different layout types. It seems display: grid does most of the 2d constraint things that people always used to talk about. I don't know the state of the art for drag-drop grid layout builders, but it seems possible that one could be built.

I mostly agree. I think it isn't drag and drop because it's surprisingly hard to make a GUI builder interface that doesn't suck balls. Some manage it though, like QtCreator.

I guess there is stuff like SquareSpace. No idea how good it is though. And FrontPage back in the day but that sucked.

The problem with drag drop frontend is the code generators that support that end up tightly coupling the document with the code, which doesn't lead to good testability and scalability. I'm optimistic that LLMs could accomplish a visual design paradigm while still designing the code in good taste, but so far I'm not holding my breath.