I do see the compromises wp puts us into but for me, the benefits of static seem awfully abstract at the end of the day. If you want me to buy it, please show me an authoring experience I actually want to live in. I haven't seen one yet.
It's not about over- our underestimating people. It's about whether the technocentricity you are selling is worth it. For some of us, it is, sure.
For one, I just hate writing with markdown. Compared to WYSIWYG (i.e. just writing), markdown's syntax is a distraction. Writing is both visual and storytelling to me, why should I exclude the visual to a separate stage of the process? Just doesn't make sense to me.
Authoring is about input to the system, static is about how the contents is given to the visitor. There is no technical reason a rich author experience cannot be coupled with a static approach to content delivery.
In fact, the article focuses mostly on page bloat, not so much server-side processing. The amount of bytes a Web page weighs in at should mostly depends on its contents, not on the author tools used to create its content.
How would you allow a user, while creating a blog post, to add commenting to the post in a way that enables progressive enhancement i.e. doesn't require javascript, with static site generators?
If you can't, what is your justification for the sacrifice in accessibility?
If you can fulfill this basic requirement, please show me the experience of using the system and show me how it is better than wp as a whole.
Of course this should be possible to turn off for certain content and moderated, but it still seems artificial to not have the discussion on the same page, compared to the original post. HN is beautiful, for instance. :)
Have my upvote.
You can pay a teenager to set up WP or netlify or more. What people pay me and possibly most HNers for is knowing what and when etc.
In a small team or just for an individual this might boil all the way down to personal preference.
Isn't the ascetic authoring experience provided my markdown just as much a result of deciding on which set of personal values are and are not important for your users?
guess it depends who you work with. Had a recent experience where I spent half an hour for an user who has trouble with basic filesystem navigation - even though he's been using computers since close to three decades.
Even as an engineer people keep on underestimating me (although sometimes they overestimate me : ). Here are some examples:
- telling accounting a number of times that they've forgotten a rather large PO.
- telling a network vendor they have a huge hole in their firewall only to be ignored until I contacted one of their huge customers which I also knew. They could have saved themselves a good deal of embarassing attention I guess.
- etc etc
Last year at JavaZone theee was an interesting talk by someone who was an early employee at a crowd funding company. He was a non-dev but talked about how he enjoyed being able to update copy in the web app (not just front page IIRC) directly after the devs had set up git, an editor and explained the basics.
If you are making the next google you'll want things to be extremely easy-to-use.
Making a google.com level UX for business apps might be smart. Or it might be insulting.