Comment by disease
21 hours ago
As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though.
Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
Yeah, for that a git-based CMS like Sveltia is really nice.
And for people that actually want to learn a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Mastro JS is as simple a static site generator as I could make it.
> supply tooling similar to Word
just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
I wonder if some part of the FrontPage [0] codebase lives on in there...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
https://openlivewriter.com/ lives on
It's definitely an approach. I do think in true democratization of the internet, teaching people some tech is inevitable. We just can't have equal access if we retain the classes of user and maker as completely distinct.