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Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

In the late 90's there were free WYSIWYG apps that generated reliable HTML/CSS. I did a deep search recently into finding the Microsoft FrontPage equivalent of today, and the only one I could find that worked reliably was Adobe Dreamweaver, and it's not free.

(Kompozer, Brackets, SeaMonkey, BlueGriffon, etc. did not work reliably for me. I found that TinyMCE etc. are WYSIWYG for text, but not for positioning [i.e. they are "rich text editors"])

Why did such free WYSIWYG apps to generate HTML/CSS die out? Anyone have theories?

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They went commercial (wix, squarespace, ...). Commercial offerings are solving not only building but also hosting, while old WYSIWYG apps where solving only building. Now I haven't use any of the apps (old, or new, so I may be wrong), but it would be great to have something that is free/oss and easier to use than SSGs.

Because they enabled too many people to have a web presence independent of social media, and therefore outside of the technosurveillance apparatus of Google/Meta/Amazon/Microsoft.

There’s a healthy appetite for WYSIWYG editors still, but nobody wants to make anything that simple anymore. It’s all about building moats, using the latest frameworks, and ultra-slick designs with spy pixels and a deluge of cookies. Everything must be in a CMS, on a hosting provider, with load balancers and CDNs, and saddled with pop-ups, pop-ins, chat boxes, e-mail signups, metric collection, data hoarding, and third-party tie-ins.

Just like websites dying out, I think people back then made them as passion projects they hoped would turn into something more (or not). I remember one I used in the early 2000s called Selida. It had this bug where it would crash randomly on save and I’d lose all of my work. I didn’t know any better and just kept using it. The end result is I had to retype my HTML so many times that it hammered it into my head until I was proficient :) This was a WYSIWYG with a code editor view (like Dreamweaver).

I remember a lot of them initially struggled with the switch to CSS (but then got much better) and then eventually responsive design just hit them hard. Normal users just didn't know how to handle making things flow and the tools struggled to explain the necessary primitives to them. IMO.

I think even if you created your site with Frontpage there was still a steep learning curve to getting that content hosted. Now there are many hosts that flatten that curve but they tend to come with their own templates/site generators which are good enough for most users. For power users who want more control HTML/CSS is not that hard to learn.

In the very early days there wasn't. The ISP provided web hosting and free FTP space.

It was literally just a case of going to (from memory, the details might be wrong) ftp://user@password:web.pipex.co.uk/ , and then putting whatever you wanted into the ~/public_html directory there.

Browsers even started bringing out FTP support so you didn't need to find a client, although I found it more reliable to use WS_FTP.

5-20mb of free hosting for every ISP customer was just something ISPs did back then. Everyone was more innocent (or naive, depending how you look at it), but there wasn't much of a barrier to getting a static site up and running, and there really wasn't too much of a learning curve beyond, "Put your files here".

FTP, Email, Webspace and newsgroups access was the norm. good old times at uunet ...

iirc they generated really bad and unmaintainable code (no css classes, absolute position, etc...), unlike (imo) modern LLMs.

In my experience, LLMs happily generate just as much unmaintainable code as Dreamweaver ever did.

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