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Netscape 4 came with Composer, Windows/Office used to come with FrontPage. People had content creation tools integrated with their browsers, but didn't use them

Netscape 4 came with Composer, Windows/Office used to come with FrontPage. People had content creation tools integrated with their browsers, but didn't use them and so they went away. I think it's because the tools were too un-opinionated and unconstrained, so if you wanted to do e.g. a blog then generic HTML editors were too much work even though they were visual. Also, static content publishing is almost never enough. You at least want(ed) search and to understand if anyone is visiting, but then you're into the realm of needing databases and such.

imiric 3y ago
> Netscape 4 came with Composer, Windows/Office used to come with FrontPage. Those are WYSIWYG tools only, which besides being a nightmare to work with, don't solve the actual serving problem. The earliest product that came close to that use case AFAIK was Opera's Unite in 2009, but it didn't last long. By that point it was already too late, since users mostly had asymmetric connections, so serving any type of content from their home network was infeasible. (Had the web launched with easy publishing tools, ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start, and this wouldn't have been a major issue.) > Also, static content publishing is almost never enough. True, but there's no reason these tools couldn't have evolved to allow dynamic content as well. Nowadays we have many different approaches that could make this possible, cobbled together from bits and pieces of native and alternative web technologies. Centralized services do make this easier, and who knows, we might've settled on them anyway, but I believe the general perception about user data would've been much different for the better had these tools existed from the start.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  I don't think there was ever much chance of people running servers from home, if only because back then computers were noisy and power management didn't work well, so it was normal to turn them off at night. But most ISPs offered some web serving space via ftp so that wasn't an issue. It was more just that the tools were too much work. Obviously they were still a lot easier than coding it all by hand!

imiric 3y ago

> Netscape 4 came with Composer, Windows/Office used to come with FrontPage. Those are WYSIWYG tools only, which besides being a nightmare to work with, don't solve the actual serving problem. The earliest product that came close to that use case AFAIK was Opera's Unite in 2009, but it didn't last long. By that point it was already too late, since users mostly had asymmetric connections, so serving any type of content from their home network was infeasible. (Had the web launched with easy publishing tools, ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start, and this wouldn't have been a major issue.) > Also, static content publishing is almost never enough. True, but there's no reason these tools couldn't have evolved to allow dynamic content as well. Nowadays we have many different approaches that could make this possible, cobbled together from bits and pieces of native and alternative web technologies. Centralized services do make this easier, and who knows, we might've settled on them anyway, but I believe the general perception about user data would've been much different for the better had these tools existed from the start.

mike_hearn 3y ago
I don't think there was ever much chance of people running servers from home, if only because back then computers were noisy and power management didn't work well, so it was normal to turn them off at night. But most ISPs offered some web serving space via ftp so that wasn't an issue. It was more just that the tools were too much work. Obviously they were still a lot easier than coding it all by hand!