Where once we dreamt of many gardens, now we have many walls

I’m reading through Anil Dash’s great blog post looking back at the way the web used to be in terms of how we thought of it, and how it was implemented. (As an aside, I’m deeply fascinated by Glitch, but have not had the time to date to spend on it that I would have wished).

In addition to his comment about how websites are now assembled, component by component, there is another aspect to modern development that I’ve strongly noticed, and that is of specialisation. It used to be that with a bit of knowledge of HTML and CSS you could go a long way, but today front end development is rich and very very deep.

I didn’t know before about the existence of Netscape Gold, the authoring version of netscape.

Anil talks about the paucity of tools for just creating a website or web page from scratch on your computer. I think he is right with this. Recently tools like small micro publishing frameworks like flask and bottle have been doing this job, but these, though lightweight, require quite a bit of conceptual overhead before you can get productive with them.

One of the most fascinating new entrants in this area is Beaker browser - a tool for creating websites on the distributed web.