Create great web apps with little to no manual HTML? Open to suggestions [closed]

Question

I'm a veteran of C and very new to web design altogether. I've found myself more excited about it recently so I've been researching the technology. I'm open to using just about anything, but as I look around I see the "View" component of MVC type technologies basically being written by hand as layouts of data.

I want to avoid having to write any of this manual View layout or View HTML - I want to be able to drop these user interface elements and arrange them as I would lay out a "standard" GUI. What technology allows this?

Answer 1

If you're looking for a framework that make web development just like desktop development, asp.net is the closest you'll come. But it is a leaky abstraction, and it has fallen out of favor for good reasons.

You can "create great web apps", and you can use "little to no manual HTML", but it is difficult to do both at the same time. There is no substitute for becoming familiar with the languages & infrastructure of the web.

Edit

My unsolicited advice for how to dive in to web development:

• Familiarize yourself with one of the MVC frameworks - say, Rails or Asp.Net MVC. Both of them have some support for scaffolding, which will give you somewhere to start from in terms of html.
• Choose a css framework. These will help you layout your pages cleanly, without needing a PhD in css.
• Once you're somewhat familiar with the above, pick up jQuery and start mixing in some javascript for more advanced behavior.