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This article seems to be making two arguments. One is that popular blog software was limiting, and its popularity discourages people from trying other forms of

by mjb 8y ago

This article seems to be making two arguments. One is that popular blog software was limiting, and its popularity discourages people from trying other forms of content. Its a reasonable take, but it's not clear to me that's actually what happened. The other argument is that the web got worse as it became accessible to people who didn't have the knowledge, skill, or time to write their own HTML. I can't help but strongly disagree with that. Yes, the web lost a certain kind of character, but it gained billions of people and many other kinds of character. There's more content, better content, and more accessibility now than ever before. That's great news, and the value of it vastly outweighs the loss of the handcrafted HTML aesthetic. Preservation and archiving are good things to be doing, and discovering the signal inside all the noise of today's internet can be challenging. Still, inviting everybody is a huge step forward.

arthev 8y ago
>better content Maybe better content in terms of the quality of the best content available, but, as you admit yourself by mentioning the noise-to-signal ratio... The average quality is abysmal.
- kqr 8y ago
  Just from personal experience: when I switched from writing my HTML by hand (even with auto-expansion in web-mode.el) to generating pages with Org, I simply had a lot more time available to increase quality. As an example, my article on Kernighan's writing[0] would simply not have happened if I was still writing HTML. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing which took very little effort thanks to the nice Org amenities. [0]: https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from-kernighan.html https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from-kerni...
- krapp 8y ago
  The average quality is always abysmal. Most of the content on that old web was also abysmal, it's just that no one cared at the time.

by mjb 8y ago

arthev 8y ago

>better content Maybe better content in terms of the quality of the best content available, but, as you admit yourself by mentioning the noise-to-signal ratio... The average quality is abysmal.

kqr 8y ago
Just from personal experience: when I switched from writing my HTML by hand (even with auto-expansion in web-mode.el) to generating pages with Org, I simply had a lot more time available to increase quality. As an example, my article on Kernighan's writing[0] would simply not have happened if I was still writing HTML. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing which took very little effort thanks to the nice Org amenities. [0]: https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from-kernighan.html https://two-wrongs.com/technical-writing-learning-from-kerni...
krapp 8y ago
The average quality is always abysmal. Most of the content on that old web was also abysmal, it's just that no one cared at the time.