The Web does not yet meet its design goal as being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read. That level of immediacy of knowledge sharing waits for easy-to-use hypertext editors to be generally available on most platforms. Most information has in fact passed through publishers or system managers of one sort or another.

The problem almost certainly starts with the conception of what we're doing as "building websites".

When we do so, we mindset of working on systems

If your systems work compromises the artifacts then it's not good work

This is part of a broader phenomenon, which is that when computers are involved with absolutely anything people seem to lose their minds good sensibilities just go out the window

low expectations from everyone everyone is so used to excusing bad work

sui generis medium

violates the principle of least power

what we should be doing when grappling with the online publishing problem—which is what this is; that's all it is—is, instead of thinking in terms of working on systems, thinking about this stuff in such a way that we never lose sight of the basics; the thing that we aspire to do when we want to put together a website is to deal in

documents and their issuing authority

That is, a piece of content and its name (the name is a qualified name that we recognize as valid only when the publisher has the relevant authority for that name, determined by its prefix; URLs)

that's it that's all a Web site is

anything else is auxiliary

really not a lot different from what goes on when you publish a book take a manuscript through final revisions for publication and then get an ISBN issued for it

so the problem comes from the industry

people "building websites" like politicians doing bad work and then their constituents not holding them accountable because that's not how politics works you don't get held accountable for doing bad work

so the thing to do is to recognize that if we're thinking about "websites" from any other position things that technical people try to steer us in the direction of like selecting a particular system and then propping it up and how to interact with a given system to convince it to do the thing we want it to do— then we're doing it wrong

we're creating content and then giving it a name

This is how I feel about most people's personal websites. Few people have homepages these days, but even for people who do, even fewer of those homes have anyone really living there. All their interesting stuff is going on on Twitter, GitHub, comments on message boards...

Really weird when this manifests as a bunch of people having really strong opinions about static site tech stacks and justifications for frontend tech that in practice they never use, because the content from any one of their profiles on the mainstream social networks outstrips their "home" page 100x to 1.

This hasn't happened yet, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We seem to be moving away from a read/write web, with authors only being able to edit content they've created on domains that they control. The closest I've seen to this is the Beaker Browser.

This is what I want too!