> I have friends who set up their own web pages in the late 90s armed with Notepad, free hosting supplied by their ISP, and some online help.
> No chance at all of most people being able to do that today.
What are you talking about?
You can still do all that. There's still free hosting available, just not through your ISP.
You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host.
> It's great that you know what a build system and github and dependencies are, but most people don't.
All the added complexity of web deployments these days is not required for a simple personal web page. You don't need JavaScript, a build system, dependency management, etc. The plain HTML written in 1998 still works today. Even the old HTML frames still work, according to a quick Google, even though they haven't been used by any site in well over 15 years.
> You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host.
Exactly. The last website I made for a festival early last year I wrote by hand with Notepad++. It ended up being 14 HTML files (7 files and 2 languages) and a couple CSS files and a lot of reading about current CSS standards. Initially I started with WordPress but couldn't find a decent theme to do the layout we wanted, so I scrapped it after a couple days of trying to bend several themes to my will.
Not much different than how I did it in the 90s... except back then I couldn't just DuckDuckGo to find thousands of pages with HTML/CSS help.
> No chance at all of most people being able to do that today.
What are you talking about?
You can still do all that. There's still free hosting available, just not through your ISP.
You can still hand-edit HTML with Notepad and publish it to a free web host.
> It's great that you know what a build system and github and dependencies are, but most people don't.
All the added complexity of web deployments these days is not required for a simple personal web page. You don't need JavaScript, a build system, dependency management, etc. The plain HTML written in 1998 still works today. Even the old HTML frames still work, according to a quick Google, even though they haven't been used by any site in well over 15 years.
> And IMO they shouldn't have to.
Good, because they don't.