Like fuck all the proprietary junk and versioning, and just have a bare bones HTML ASCII extranet designed to be simple and without any bugs to patch? Obviously a naive question.
But seriously, the 56k dialup world with Napster GeoCities and AOL Instant Messenger was better. Add capacitive touch screens, current data throughput infra, and lithium batteries to 1999 and we are peak Matrix internet territory. Yahoo and net navigator were better than chrome stalkerware and google digislaver fascism.
It wasn’t better. Static pages are just boring, you read it one time and then that’s it. Not enough people can write plain HTML so it would matter.
The internet today with Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. is way closer to what Tim Berners-Lee imagined that everyone would be a publisher, not only consumer.
You don’t have to know or write plain HTML. There are plenty of static page generators that take markdown and generate a site for you. Also, boring is good and yes, read once and don’t care next is also good: it’s how books work for thousands of years. If you like a site or article/post you’ll get back to it sometime, if not that’s OK.
It’s easier to learn and write plain HTML than it is to use a static page generator. I will die on this hill. Static page generators are all needlessly complicated because they are made by developers for developers to show off.
Static page generator is already half way to a blog with a database.
It is kinda ironic having this debate on a platform that isn’t static html
This is one of those times when the attempt to address the wrong part of a statement immediately goes into Ackermann-like recursion.
The only irony present is the pretense of validity of the supposed contradiction.