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@dillo It says a lot about modern "civilization" that the idea of a fully participative online medium terrified people out of their minds and they rushed to kill off one of the best things about the web. See also all the FUD aimed at Wikipedia. Speaking of which: for a while, as wikis were all the rage, there was an initiative called the Universal Edit Button. That, too, largely fizzled out. And here we are now.

@dillo As I was telling some friends on IRC last night: now and then I point someone at one of my Feather Wiki documents. They invariably let me know in alarm that they can click Edit and change any page! So I have to explain that's their own local copy, running in the browser. How the world has changed.

@felix I assume SPAM plays a big role in making it read-only, but it doesn't need to be that way.

@dillo Exactly! Far as I can tell, the threat of spam is a whole other problem.

@dillo The reason why editing never took off is related to the way world wide web got popular: collaborative editing was not a driving force behind the early web adoption, but unification of many different information systems was. See: blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29

blog.marbu.euThe first web browser
More from Martin Bukatovič

@marbu You went through the exact same feeling when discovering the editing capabilities of WorldWideWeb :)
Your analysis focusing on the earliest browsers, before Mosaic is very insightful in the early loss of traction of WorldWideWeb in research labs. Thanks for sharing it!

I think there is also some other arguments that happened over time. Choices made by Mosaic, Firefox and Chrome. Each were a simplification compared to the previous browser UI, each were focusing even more on reading the web, while delegating even more features to the websites.

@technobarje Even though I used Mozilla Suite myself for a while like 20 year ago or so, I always considered that editor as a separate application. It never occurred to me that I could try to edit my own plain html pages to make notes in a similar way I use wiki ...

It only all clicked for me while I was reading the book about world wide web history ...

@marbu We should have had a browser where the search box (=address bar) was as important as a "create/edit" button. That button would have helped your onboard editing, but also hosting and publishing. Things that happened to exists in late version of Netscape, but by that time Netscape already lost most of its audience and never integrated it into the browser UI.

I dream of a browser, which, when you type an unknown URL, it would guide you to book the domain (if domain doesn't exists), find a host (if the domain exists but there is no valid resolution), publish (if there is a valid resolution).

@technobarje This is nice! I will try this out. When I was thinking about editing html, I realized that for html to be "editable" as originally envisaged, one will need to avoid some html features which are not playing well with editing (all I care about is basically core structure such as links, paragraphs, lists, tables ... only). And recently I noticed that someone else had the same idea already: russellbeattie.com/notes/posts

https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/ · We need an HTML Document standardBy Russell Beattie