Comment by hhas01

“Not accurate; this comes off as very Nelsonian.”

Yep, TBL’s original WorldWideWeb browser was read-write. And yes, it was Andressen’s Mosaic that locked in the popular perception of the web as read-only medium.

However, it’s wrong to blame the Mosaic team as they were only following TBL’s lead here. The first read-only browser was TBL’s invention, being a quick-and-lazy way to port a lowest-common-denominator demonstrator to mainstream platforms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

“[TBL’s] team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this [authoring] feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser

That one bad decision is one of the greatest (i.e. worst) demonstrations of the Law of Unintended Consequences in action, and deserves to be taught in every undergrad computing/psychology/marketing course, alongside the Osborne Effect and every other major disaster carelessly created by very clever people who did not ask themselves one very simple question: “What could possibly go wrong?”

(Upvoted for knowing your history. I wish many more did.)

..

Re. Markdown/WYSIWYG:

“They're not fundamentally opposed.”

I’m all for combining the strengths of different UI modes, and Markdown is something I commonly use myself for structured text input. I’d even go so far as to say it’s a great shame TBL chose SGML as the foundation for HTML, rather than annotated plain text a-la Markdown. But there’s a vast gulf between expert users who benefit from such high-efficiency “shortcuts”, with their attendant learning curve and unforgivingness, and everyone else.

Again, look at word processors and spreadsheets and how many people use those Correctly vs how many just use them. Look too at how MS Office makes it more difficult to use them well (e.g. style sheets) than use them badly (direct styles). Casual users require a no-height barrier to entry and extremely low-friction usage; they cannot be asked to learn or use a professional mode UI. The primary entry point has to be WYSIWYG, because the cost of learning anything more advanced exceeds the value to be obtained from its use.

An efficient, effective UI for occasional amateur users is not the same as the UI for high-volume professional users. Ironically, while MS Office does a good job of neither, LibreOffice—in slavishly replicating all of MS’s poor design choices rather than studying them and asking how it could do better—completely fails to exploit those opportunites itself.

..

Products like WWW and LO reveal a key failing of Really Smart People: those big brains of theirs just make it far too easy for them just to brute-force suboptimal solutions rapidly out the door. Just as those overpowered brains make it far too easy for them to manage the unnecessarily high costs of using those suboptimal solutions themselves. It’s everyone else who pays the full price for their failure of rigor or parsimony. But hey, I’m not complaining: makes it easier for a dumbass like me to beat them just by being a crafty bastard instead.:)

--

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”