> Personally I believe the first step should be reshaping Firefox into a full-blown WYSIWYG document editor, analogous to MS Word except that instead of reading and writing to a local filesystem it reads and writes them via HTTP[S] requests.
> Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate.
Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.
This has been done (wysiwyg Mozilla browser). Mozilla used to ship Composer, and then post Firefox there was nvu. Now there is Blue Griffon, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine.
What Facebook provides that has so much value is audience that includes lots of people you know.
Yes, I’m quite aware that Mozilla used to have a crappy HTML editor strapped on as an afterthought. Treating editing as a second-/third-class citizen and not as a first- is exactly what led to this mess in the first place.
Again, see Tim Berners-Lee and the first, second, and third web browsers ever released, and notice what changed along the way.
If you cannot edit and save a web document as easily as you can read it, the system has already failed. If you have to switch mental or environment modes to do so, the system has already failed. If you have to switch to a different tool to complete the write operation (e.g. FTP client), the system has already failed. If you have to fiddle with individual files instead of discrete documents, the system has already failed. If you have to manage local copies vs remote copies of your documents, the system has already failed. And so on.
It doesn’t matter how important something is, if you make it hard (or even just harder) to do, 99% of people will not do it. That’s not on them as the users; it’s on you as the product developers.
Making a read-write web work as a mass end-user product means eliminating ALL the user-facing distinctions between web-browsing for reading and web-browsing for writing. Those distinctions are completely contrived and unnecessary—not to mention ultimately harmful—and the only reason it ever existed in the first place is ’cos Tim Berners-Lee was a lazy ass who couldn’t be bothered to port the authoring part of WorldWideWeb to Windows, and in doing so destroyed the very Open Web that he himself invented.
Talk about Laws of Unintended Consequences.
Like I say, think of MS Word (not an ideal example in terms of ease of use, but it is ubiquitous and an interaction model everyone understands), only instead of reading and writing to file paths reads and writes to URLs. That is the basic UX an open web requires. Anything else is just the geeks playing with themselves (again), which the marketers and money men will make into their own (again).
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I mean, it should not be hard to grasp (I am a BoVLB, so if I can see it…), yet so many dyed-in-the-wool geeks utterly fail to grasp it. Maybe that’s because they’re so inured to the current imbalanced system that they cannot imagine it being any other way? Perhaps because they themselves are a deeply integrated part of that system and, on the inside looking out, cannot see what all the fuss is about when that imbalance already works in their favor.
Alas, we do seem to be two cultures separated by a common language here, so help me understand how to explain it in a way y’all can understand.
HTML is pretty easy to edit, even with 1997 era tools (by 97, even WordPerfect could edit a web page). What made it hard for users (and required developers) was when we we started adding dynamic menus (even if they were inserted by a server side script) and dynamic content (inserting records from a database to a document). FrontPage had a little workaround for that used Java applets for dynamic content, and that let people design whole sites with what looked like a dynamic navigatioin.
Congratulations on so utterly missing the point. (Again.) 99% of web users do not want to edit HTML, because they have far better things to do with their lives. I don’t care how easy you find it, because you aren’t representative of any of them.
But since you mention it, HTML is reeking garbage. It has so many freaking rules, and special exceptions, and not-exceptions, and “<>”, and if you don’t get the punctuation just right then your actual content is going to get some degree of screwed up. Which, considering it’s the user content, not the machine markup, that is supposed to be the important part, is a thoroughly FUBARed set of UX priorities (or SOP for the nerdocracy).
But even if HTML was the very model of simplicity and clarity, very few end-users would want to type it themselves. I mean, what’s the fluency in Markdown outside of geek circles?
Oh, and let’s not forget that having broken the user out of her familiar web browser environment and, against all odds, somehow persuaded her to compose a correctly marked up HTML document in a text editor or something, she still has to get that document onto the web somehow, which means screwing with yet another obnoxious app and yet another arcane set of buttons and rules for using that app, all of which is almost entirely unlike their familiar web browser and how they use that.
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TL;DR: Computer nerds who arrogantly whine “well it’s easy for meeeee” put my back up like nothing else on Earth. So if you don’t wish to be burned to a crisp then don’t ever talk to me about “open web” when you’re the self-serving jackasses who closed it in the first place.
p.s. I am also very not interested in talking about dynamic menus and stuff, because of the billions of people who post their own content online via Twitbook every day, how much of that content includes custom codes they wrote?
Wordpress is a brilliant example of Inner Platform Effect[1] in all its hideous misbegotten architecture-iness, and symbolic of (and literally) everything wrong with the web we now have today.
A newer example of that same effect is Dropbox, which allows users to read and write files to web-based storage and share with others. Great for Dropbox Inc; piss all use to an open web.
First Rule of Open Web: Shoot all the Middlemen. Because they are the first indicator that you’ve done it wrong.
And if you still can’t see the red flag these “middlewares” represent then shoot yourself too, because you’re part of very the same problem. Nerds love complexity, and they love devising complex solutions to problems they’ve created themselves.
That you so completely missed the point without even trying sadly demonstrates that we have a very very long way to go.
> Can’t blame the Jacks and the Zucks for taking the opportunity that was handed to them on a plate.
Notice that "WYSIWYGs for web" existed before the advent of Jacks and Zucks. There was Wordpress, with all its glorious WYSIWYGiness that FB and Twitter lacked, which, according to Wikipedia, was first released in 2003. There was LiveJournal that got released even earlier. And yet, it is Jack and Zuck, not Matt (Mullenweg) or Brad (Fitzpatrick), who somehow caught the zeitgeist and attracted the crowds.