Remember the days of Microsoft FrontPage? I first cut my web development teeth using that tool, and at the time I thought it was amazing. Designing a web site was made easy and I really liked the WYSIWYG editing style. I eventually migrated to Adobe Dreamweaver which seemed (and was) even more powerful.

Nearly 20 years have passed since my start in web development. With a computer science degree under my belt, along with 13+ years of professional experience, I can only look back on those days and laugh at my naivety. Those tools seemed slick at the time, but they were pretty clunky in actuality. The HTML and rudimentary CSS that each generated was ugly and bloated. That said, the WYSIWYG movement never really died. With modern companies like Squarespace and Wix.com, the "build it as you go" web model is still alive and kicking.

WordPress now also seems to be headed that way. I use WordPress here at Born Geek, and I just recently updated to version 5.0. The giant new feature in this release is the new Gutenberg editor, which offers a visual means of laying out your content. To a technical minded person like myself, who typically writes posts in Markdown, the editor is incredibly confusing. I don't want to have to insert "blocks" with my mouse every time I need a bulleted list or image.

The new editor in WordPress is no doubt an attempt to win users from the Squarespaces and Wix.coms of today's market. I wonder, however, if this comes at the cost of alienating technical users or users who are simply used to the old look and feel. Giant changes are always likely to have push back, especially with a user base as large as that of WordPress. Given, however, that the Classic Editor plugin already has over one million users, I'd say that this change has a bigger negative opinion than the WordPress powers-that-be might be willing to admit. It will be interesting to see how things progress over the next few months. I'm just thankful that the Classic Editor plugin even exists.