May 23, 2019
The web originally conceived by Tim Berners Lee wasn’t a read-only medium, it was read/write. Then the web went commercial, then mobile changed everything.
Technical complexity grew, but more importantly a growing faction of tech-heads started poo-pooing anything that wasn’t up to their standard. Their metric today is a mix of technical purity aspects, “semantics”, search engine optimization, or what have you. That’s all fine and good.
Very rarely is inclusion a metric. And that’s… not good.
Through raising technical complexity and a bit of an attitude, creating web content has become elitist.
Of course subjectively the tech-heads are right. But they then proceed to make claims about what is right or wrong in absolute terms.
The irony is any run of the mill web agency these days will not delve into the technical complexity, they’ll slap some mediocre copy on a cheap wordpress template, add a boatload of data collection plugins, and call it a day. As an aside this suggest the principles might be more about job security than about metrics.
A tool like Sparkle is criticized for not being perfect in every aspect. They are fair criticisms until you realize that they stand because of everything Sparkle gets right. Sparkle is good enough to care. And you don’t have to be a web developer to use everything Sparkle offers. (Also, don’t assume Sparkle is finished, lots more to come.)
Sparkle customers come from all backgrounds, from small web shops that got tired of running after css glitches, to independent creatives and authors, small businesses and retired senior citizens.
Sparkle brings back the ability to write to the web to all those who where cut out by the growing complexity. It brings back the voices of a huge majority of web users, it brings back the skills of graphic designers who had been relegated to print design.
The voice of everybody who isn’t a professional coder or copywriter is necessary and missing. The web is richer with them, even if the site they produce isn’t “professional” or perfect under every point of view.
