> If you translate your entire comment to the non-browser development arena, it seems totally nuts.
Translate it to literacy then. Should everybody be a prolific author or an avid reader? No, it's okay if they're not. Should everybody have the option, the basic ability to? Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if it was considered a human right, or implied by human rights. It's not okay for people to be unable to read, just like poverty is not okay. And what's more, you don't need to know about the chemistry of ink or paper to be literate, just like you don't need to be able to solder a CPU from toothpicks to be computer literate. It's all a matter of degree, with no hard lines, but still, I'm not happy to give up that easily on that much.
We already accepted that making a website is too hard for "normal" users, that just everything taking place in the equivalent of malls is fine, with people hardly interacting in private or public spaces, except for a bunch of wizards in ivory towers, and that is a shame and cannot stand. Especially since the poison of planned obsolescence has already permeated anything to do with computing; if "normal" people can't create their own software and robots, it will not lead to better software and robots made by experts, it will lead to marketing departments shoveling regressing bloatware to people, ultimately. Yeah I'm exaggerating, too, this is FUD in a way, I know that... but I can't help it, this is the one thing to do with computers that really gets to me. I can live with not everybody being a programmer, but I cannot live with not every programmer wishing everybody could program. Being able to make a static website is not even a tiny subset of that, but if I can't even give up on general coding literacy, I can't even consider giving up on general web literacy.
So while it's totally silly to worry over the announcement of something when we don't even, and that will be freely available to everyone, I absolutely love that so many brought this issue up! It does give me hope. But so far, Mozilla has brought me nothing but joy, so I'm not anxious. Whatever it is, it will be open source, right? Right :D Anyone from Mozilla reading this, you guys rock.
TL;DR: I had a dream of a world where the words "developer" and "user" were out of use, just like "free citizen" as distinction to the default case of slave or woman is out of use today (well okay, those problems are also not overcome, but at least there is a consensus amongst smart people that they should be).
Translate it to literacy then. Should everybody be a prolific author or an avid reader? No, it's okay if they're not. Should everybody have the option, the basic ability to? Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if it was considered a human right, or implied by human rights. It's not okay for people to be unable to read, just like poverty is not okay. And what's more, you don't need to know about the chemistry of ink or paper to be literate, just like you don't need to be able to solder a CPU from toothpicks to be computer literate. It's all a matter of degree, with no hard lines, but still, I'm not happy to give up that easily on that much.
We already accepted that making a website is too hard for "normal" users, that just everything taking place in the equivalent of malls is fine, with people hardly interacting in private or public spaces, except for a bunch of wizards in ivory towers, and that is a shame and cannot stand. Especially since the poison of planned obsolescence has already permeated anything to do with computing; if "normal" people can't create their own software and robots, it will not lead to better software and robots made by experts, it will lead to marketing departments shoveling regressing bloatware to people, ultimately. Yeah I'm exaggerating, too, this is FUD in a way, I know that... but I can't help it, this is the one thing to do with computers that really gets to me. I can live with not everybody being a programmer, but I cannot live with not every programmer wishing everybody could program. Being able to make a static website is not even a tiny subset of that, but if I can't even give up on general coding literacy, I can't even consider giving up on general web literacy.
So while it's totally silly to worry over the announcement of something when we don't even, and that will be freely available to everyone, I absolutely love that so many brought this issue up! It does give me hope. But so far, Mozilla has brought me nothing but joy, so I'm not anxious. Whatever it is, it will be open source, right? Right :D Anyone from Mozilla reading this, you guys rock.
TL;DR: I had a dream of a world where the words "developer" and "user" were out of use, just like "free citizen" as distinction to the default case of slave or woman is out of use today (well okay, those problems are also not overcome, but at least there is a consensus amongst smart people that they should be).