Chiming in with a few others here - I think uilang looks like a lovely idea, and very clever really given how few line of code are required, but I'm not sure it's genuinely all that useful.
I used to work with a brilliant designer (seriously great - he could realise the most terrible and tangled client ideas in the most stunningly creative and beautiful ways), but code was just gibberish to him. He'd managed to muddle his way through doing simple interactions in ActionScript 2 with the help of several developer friends, but the move to ActionScript 3 had completely defeated him.
I gave him a set of little snippets ("This is how you make something clickable: <code>") and once he had that, he was off. He never properly understood things like for loops, but it didn't really matter to him too much since he was perfectly happy copying and pasting since the end result looked no different.
I don't think having to learn a precisely structured invocation in English (with particular CSS selectors in it) would really be any better for him than just copying in `$("#foo").on("click", function() { $("#bar").addClass("hide"); });` as long as someone had told him "#foo" was what you were clicking on and "#bar" was what you were hiding.
I actually think the other problem with this idea is that the CSS is probably harder to understand than the JavaScript, and the number of people who can write `transform: translateY(80%) scale(.8); transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(.3, 0, 0, 1.3);` but can't write just a couple of lines of jQuery must be vanishingly small.
The designers I know, at least, either know no CSS and JavaScript at all, or minimal amounts of CSS and JavaScript, or a lot of CSS and the basics of JavaScript - I don't really know any in 2014 who are experts at CSS but have no JavaScript (but I'm happy to be proven wrong on that).
I'd consider myself an expert at CSS, at a level where I can and have built very large frameworks with deep mixins, extends and variable use in Sass that need to be used across multiple projects.
I know the basics of Javascript, mostly around JQuery and setting up things like Grunt and Bower. The types of actions this framework solve are too low level even for me. As you mentioned earlier, I can copy paste or lookup any onclick or toggle events, which are about 90% of all display side JavaScript. Add this class, remove this class... etc.
Comments
Chiming in with a few others here - I think uilang looks like a lovely idea, and very clever really given how few line of code are required, but I'm not sure it's genuinely all that useful.
I used to work with a brilliant designer (seriously great - he could realise the most terrible and tangled client ideas in the most stunningly creative and beautiful ways), but code was just gibberish to him. He'd managed to muddle his way through doing simple interactions in ActionScript 2 with the help of several developer friends, but the move to ActionScript 3 had completely defeated him.
I gave him a set of little snippets ("This is how you make something clickable: <code>") and once he had that, he was off. He never properly understood things like for loops, but it didn't really matter to him too much since he was perfectly happy copying and pasting since the end result looked no different.
I don't think having to learn a precisely structured invocation in English (with particular CSS selectors in it) would really be any better for him than just copying in `$("#foo").on("click", function() { $("#bar").addClass("hide"); });` as long as someone had told him "#foo" was what you were clicking on and "#bar" was what you were hiding.
I actually think the other problem with this idea is that the CSS is probably harder to understand than the JavaScript, and the number of people who can write `transform: translateY(80%) scale(.8); transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(.3, 0, 0, 1.3);` but can't write just a couple of lines of jQuery must be vanishingly small.
The designers I know, at least, either know no CSS and JavaScript at all, or minimal amounts of CSS and JavaScript, or a lot of CSS and the basics of JavaScript - I don't really know any in 2014 who are experts at CSS but have no JavaScript (but I'm happy to be proven wrong on that).
Just to add some anecdote to your post.
I'd consider myself an expert at CSS, at a level where I can and have built very large frameworks with deep mixins, extends and variable use in Sass that need to be used across multiple projects.
I know the basics of Javascript, mostly around JQuery and setting up things like Grunt and Bower. The types of actions this framework solve are too low level even for me. As you mentioned earlier, I can copy paste or lookup any onclick or toggle events, which are about 90% of all display side JavaScript. Add this class, remove this class... etc.