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)
Brian Swetland@aparrish I also think this attitude (of the web being way too complex) is weird with various improvements to HTML, CSS, Javascript, various web APIs, the "evergreen" browsers being much more homogeneous, etc.
I firmly believe that the solution to something becoming hard to understand because of giant piles of middleware and libraries and frameworks is not *more* middleware and autogenerated piles of slop on top of it... but rather the opposite.