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> there was never any Edenic period

Agreed.

I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.

First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.

Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.

> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability

I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?

I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.




> Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.

But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)

And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.

> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.

> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of <img> tags and a 'viewport' <meta> tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.


> IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking

There's one exception to this: an HTML page without styling has line width equal to the browser window. Narrow text columns are a dramatic increase in readability.

(And I don't even maximize my browser window... a shocking number of people do, despite the fact that they're using ultra-wide 16:9 screens.)




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