3 ms·

I don't think Dreamweaver was "too complicated" [1] and I recall seeing tons of sites in the 90s, some managed by hand, some by program (whether custom written

by spc476 2y ago

I don't think Dreamweaver was "too complicated" [1] and I recall seeing tons of sites in the 90s, some managed by hand, some by program (whether custom written or commercial). Yes, that might have been early adapters of technology, but I recall seeing web sites from as many non-technical people as technical (and I'm not talking about GeoCites either). Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't think it was centralization via GeoCities and Tripod was a major misstep. Yes, possibly a misstep, but there were several along the way (Javascript and Active-X are two that come to mind). [1] Just how stupid do we need to assume a user is? A person who has never seen a phone would still need training on how to use it, and that's not a hard thing to use at all.

imiric 2y ago
The WYSIWYG tools were part of the problem. The entire process of publishing was too complicated. Think of it when compared to a web browser for consuming content. The user doesn't need to know anything about DNS, HTTP, HTML, or any of the underlying technologies. They type an address (which is already a hurdle for many people, and one we mostly managed to collectively overcome) or click on a link, and content appears on their screen. It all just happens behind the scenes. In contrast, even with web builders of the 90s, they needed to know how to setup an FTP client, what "uploading" was, how all this maps to web "pages" and URLs, etc. If they wanted to make their websites interactive, they needed to at least be familiar with this new fangled JavaScript, CGI, ActiveX, or whatever the tech du jour was. Eventually they needed to be familiar with databases and storage. Today this is a complicated mess reserved for web developers. Modern website builders do a drastically better job at simplifying all this, but they're 3rd parties you give full control to over your content and data. If you wanted to avoid this and self-publish, then the barrier to entry is significantly higher. The core of the problem is that the publishing equivalent of the web browser simply doesn't exist. The web would've never taken off if the web browser was this complicated. Some early adopters managed to make publishing work, but most of them were tech geeks who later became web developers. This process was never approachable to the tech illiterate. The reason I think this was the primary misstep that got us to where we are today is because of the companies that stepped in to fill the publishing void. At first they were early "giants" like GeoCities and Lycos, but later they became the MySpaces, Facebooks and Twitters. The entire industry of social media simply wouldn't exist if people were enabled to self-publish their content instead of entrusting this to a 3rd party. It's possible that the idea of web search and discovery would've been a built-in feature of this distributed web, so giants like AltaVista, Yahoo and Google would've been less powerful or unnecessary. Without this industry forming, advertisers would have a smaller entrypoint and we might have missed the early annoyance of banner ads and popups, and the current evolution of it with user tracking, targeting, data brokering, privacy violations, propaganda machinery, and all the related evils of adtech. The WWW would've been a wildly different experience, and possibly closer to what TBL originally envisioned. It's a damn shame we never got that. Now it's too late not just for the web, but for any related technology to achieve similar adoption. This is why the solution needs to place the UX first, and be vastly easier to use and more powerful than the current web, if it ever wants to attract users beyond just tech geeks. I haven't seen a solution that does this yet. Opera's Unite was probably the closest we ever got.

by spc476 2y ago

imiric 2y ago

The WYSIWYG tools were part of the problem. The entire process of publishing was too complicated. Think of it when compared to a web browser for consuming content. The user doesn't need to know anything about DNS, HTTP, HTML, or any of the underlying technologies. They type an address (which is already a hurdle for many people, and one we mostly managed to collectively overcome) or click on a link, and content appears on their screen. It all just happens behind the scenes. In contrast, even with web builders of the 90s, they needed to know how to setup an FTP client, what "uploading" was, how all this maps to web "pages" and URLs, etc. If they wanted to make their websites interactive, they needed to at least be familiar with this new fangled JavaScript, CGI, ActiveX, or whatever the tech du jour was. Eventually they needed to be familiar with databases and storage. Today this is a complicated mess reserved for web developers. Modern website builders do a drastically better job at simplifying all this, but they're 3rd parties you give full control to over your content and data. If you wanted to avoid this and self-publish, then the barrier to entry is significantly higher. The core of the problem is that the publishing equivalent of the web browser simply doesn't exist. The web would've never taken off if the web browser was this complicated. Some early adopters managed to make publishing work, but most of them were tech geeks who later became web developers. This process was never approachable to the tech illiterate. The reason I think this was the primary misstep that got us to where we are today is because of the companies that stepped in to fill the publishing void. At first they were early "giants" like GeoCities and Lycos, but later they became the MySpaces, Facebooks and Twitters. The entire industry of social media simply wouldn't exist if people were enabled to self-publish their content instead of entrusting this to a 3rd party. It's possible that the idea of web search and discovery would've been a built-in feature of this distributed web, so giants like AltaVista, Yahoo and Google would've been less powerful or unnecessary. Without this industry forming, advertisers would have a smaller entrypoint and we might have missed the early annoyance of banner ads and popups, and the current evolution of it with user tracking, targeting, data brokering, privacy violations, propaganda machinery, and all the related evils of adtech. The WWW would've been a wildly different experience, and possibly closer to what TBL originally envisioned. It's a damn shame we never got that. Now it's too late not just for the web, but for any related technology to achieve similar adoption. This is why the solution needs to place the UX first, and be vastly easier to use and more powerful than the current web, if it ever wants to attract users beyond just tech geeks. I haven't seen a solution that does this yet. Opera's Unite was probably the closest we ever got.