allisonre: this that has been making the rounds https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/ i'm always struck by sentences like "the technical barrier went up" that don't attribute what happened to any cause in particular. technical barriers are not agents and they do not go up on their own (nor for that matter are "technical barriers" one monolithic thing that move in a single direction). if you're going to make a plan of action, you have to figure out *who and what* changed (the perception of) "technical barriers"
i think you could make a good case that the "technical barriers went up" in web dev in particular due to the web becoming commercialized: when you're worrying about click throughs and seo and conversion rates, and moving at capital pace, you make code and use frameworks that sacrifice legibility for extraction and dev velocity. view source is useless nowadays because of the buildup of cruft related to those goals (at least partially, imo)
i can still teach someone how to write html and css and use sftp to upload a website in an afternoon (and honestly css makes this learning process MORE accessible, not less!). but that process is pretty divorced from the main thing people want to use the web for today (make money and run scams)
problem puppy@aparrish yea 100%. none of it has become less accessible or harder! if anything everything is easier to build, easier to learn, more affordable, and full of options. but the average goalpost has been moved to mars
Raven667@alice @aparrish I write documentation and knowledge base articles using HTML, which is ultimately what it was originally built for, creating documents at CERN easy enough for physics researchers, who were not primarily IT people, to write. Its still perfectly well suited to this task. I'm pretty sure I could teach my 9yo to write a basic article using HTML, and back in the day lots of people of varying skill level made MySpace and GeoCities pages with just HTML.
I happen to think that Markdown-style is even easier for knowledge management, and I've never written Gopher to compare against, but Markdown doesn't have the features to make webapps, and HTML/CSS/JS has pretty much completely replaced native platform toolkits for GUI app development.
I also develop some basic webapps too, not React-style SPAs because as you say the goalposts are on Mars, and basic forms are still doable, esp with all the things modern HTML5 input elements provide that don't require any JS to use, like the pattern attribute for client-side validation. Most things which are actually useful for a computer to do dont require the latest technology, personal computers were essentially feature complete by the end of the 2000s, they just need someone who cares to learn and to not get hung up trying to compete with million dollar commercial development teams. CGI still exists and is viable if you dont need to care about monopolistic scalability.