Authoring Virtualized Webpages

Web hosts like Wix and Squarespace bundle web hosting with web authoring. There is a movement afoot of socialized data ownership, considering product lifetime, maintainability, freedom, data rights, and subscription models of payment.

Modern web-authoring software is an object oriented drop-n-drag web-based GUI.  The resultant web site is stored in a database much like a blog website is stored in a database. The database is rendered by proprietary software to look and behave like a set of web files. The website must live at their host site. It’s not possible to reduce the website down to elemental files that can be ported to a new host.

Wix is a contained or boxed suite of services that includes a GUI on-line web editor, plus hosting. One cannot “get a copy of your web page files”. It appears the website content can’t ever go to a place other than Wix.

This is sort of like the next step beyond WordPress as a blog suite. A blog “is” (sort of) a web page, but really it’s a *rendering* of a database behind the web page. In a similar way, a Wix webpage is not old-fashioned web page files, rather it is a rendering of things (pictures, text) objectified with character and actions and stashed in a database. We’ve virtualized to a new level.

I’m noticing that web pages are going through a “new bow wave advance”. A lot of them are declaring incompatibility with old browsers, while introduce similar operation effects (e.g. they scroll large macro photos and menus around on the screen). Now, I know Google is driving some of the incompatibility by prioritizing encrypted pages in their search results. I’m also noticing the new fad of using in-bordered photographs that fill the screen that actively scroll.

Whether it’s technical or artistic, it’s surprising that “millions” of web authors are all choosing to do the changes at the same time. I sensed something was afoot. And now I know. All the “web authors” are not writing in original html code anymore. The web pages are being written by these meta-level software packages on sites like Wix and Squarespace. When the underlying support package changes, all the web pages change at the same time.

Hmm.. not sure I like this because anybody with an older computer is dropped out of the internet market space. This drives away a certain base of customers. I tend to drift toward capital ownership 1-time costs that stop subscription fees. For example, I paid $45 for my Obi202 phone system and now I don’t pay a monthly fee for a land-line phone service.