> 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

> 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.