Twenty years ago, when internet usage started up steep slope of its hockey-stick growth in adoption rates, web programming was much "closer to the metal" than it is today. I'm certainly not advocating for a return to those days. (For one thing, FTP via command-line is tedious unless you're a preternaturally fast and accurate typist--and I'm certainly not.)
Nor do I think that it's a loss to my trade that content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal have taken a lot of grunt-work out of setting up a website. They've certainly given people less of an excuse for not updating their website content, too, which is all to the good. I'd muuuuch rather be working on business logic or databases than jerking pixels around on a screen. More power to them who can do it without their brains leaking out their ears.
Plus, I've hand-coded a blog in HTML before. Booooooorrring.... So I'm glad that Blogspot--and to a lesser degree the messier Tumblr--have made formatting a highlight-and-click operation.
It's great that the tools have become slick enough
that someone with little to no programming/database knowledge could
click an icon, step through a wizard, and have their own customised
website. And, if they're willing to put up with a certain amount of
jankiness, they can hook it into a shopping cart and payment processing
for an online store. Sweet.
But the increasing sophistication of the tools and platforms for putting words and images on the internet are making my life difficult in one respect. Namely, that when I do need to open up the "black box" to (figuratively) poke and prod, I'm seeing less and less ability to do that. At least with shared hosting, which is the cheapest (and thus most commoditised) way you can rent web server space from someone.
But as such tools/have lost their rough edges and hidden the complexities and underpinnings of the system, the server "landlords" have--in my experience--been removing access to those underpinnings. Sometimes in ways that make absolutely zero (if not, in fact, negative) sense. For instance, I'm finding it difficult to fine-tune access to my databases because the tools are incomplete...when they're not completely unavailable. Without being too technical, that's a Big Deal(TM) for me because it impacts overall web application security. When you make it difficult for me to protect my clients' data to the best of my ability, we have a problem.
In other words, the lid of the "black box" has been nailed down.
Worse, trying to make the support techs understand that is wasting more of my time than I can afford to spend lately. Which tells me that I'm dealing with people who are more used to fiddling with the dashboard than going under the hood. That's disconcerting.
I'm all for making the toolset more ergonomic, even (maybe especially) in the cognitive sense. But that doesn't require taking away powerful, if somewhat more arcane tools. Even in the name of saving screen space. In fact, hiding the latter toolset behind an "Ugly Tools" header would pretty much encourage anyone who doesn't, say, know how to write a stored procedure to back out after the first curious peek.
I realise that it can often be negligible, but there is a difference between mainstreaming technology and dumbing it down. The current state of things (at least as I've experienced them in the last year or so) has definitely crossed that line.
Then again, I live in a world where people are willing to pay top dollar for a slick interface to a walled garden--or should I say Apple orchard. Which is precisely the problem. I won't buy an iPhone on principle. Yet there are any number of alternatives that don't think I'm too incompetent/precious to, say, add more memory, change the battery, side-load apps., etc.
But when commoditisation of the web hosting market not only limits my choice, but interferes with my due diligence as a web developer? That just makes me crabby. Look, I'm glad that we've can scale solutions to problems mostly likely to befall the fat head (not a pejorative term) of the long tail. But some of us are out there tackling problems for the niches who may someday become mainstream. Don't make our work any more challenging, alright? #grumble
