[thegeomaster]

Sorry, but this looks like you're attacking a straw man. I never said that "not all systems should be programmable". My actual belief is, as a matter of fact, completely opposed to that.

What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages. The gap is shrinking, but will exist for at least quite some time. I'm not being an elitist, just real. The technical expertise needed to browse even the most complex websites versus the one needed to put together even the simplest ones is far smaller. Why would putting this Web IDE into an add-on ever accent the border between creation and consumption?

It's good to have software with a single responsibility. All other things equal, Mozilla's Firefox division can maintain a web browser without an IDE better than they can a browser with an IDE. If Mozilla was to develop an IDE, it would be easier to split it into a separate piece of software (say an add-on) and dedicate another, different development team to work on it. That would be another program with a single responsibility.

This is vaguely reminiscent of the Unix way, and I'm very respectable of it, for the main reason that it's aligned with my personal philosophy (KISS), but also because it was able to create and sustain such a big community founded on openness and contributions and not driven by profit margins and managers in suits.

[asadotzler]

"What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages."

This is simply wrong. I was writing web pages with very little technical ability starting way back in 1996 because view source was built in and not an add-on and that made it easy to learn without any technical expertise. Today the web platform is richer and so it makes good sense for the view source of today to also be richer.

[thegeomaster]

> I was writing web pages with very little technical ability Yes, a little. Similarly, I sad a degree of technical expertise. Not a lot, just a little, but enough to differentiate the creator from the consumer.

Today, even if browsers don't have "View Source", you can search Google for "how to make web sites", and a zillion results would pop up. It's not a roadblock.

[asadotzler]

Not everyone learns by reading a book or article. Lots of people learn by tinkering.

[thegeomaster]

It's hard, if not impossible, to learn stuff exclusively by tinkering. I developed my interest in HTML because I clicked an "Edit in FrontPage" button in IE6 (or was it IE5/4?), but I don't think I could learn HTML in thorough detail just by poking around FrontPage. The Internet then came to my rescue.

My point is, even if IE didn't include that toolbar button, I would've started up FrontPage on my computer sooner or later. It was just a matter of timing and a string of coincidences. Some other string of coincidences could've led me there, too. I say that the argument "some people would tinker and by moving the IDE into an add-on wouldn't let them tinker enough" is pretty weak. If you're curious about something, you tend not to get stopped by things such as that: that curiosity drives you to poke around incrementally until you either find what you're looking for or fuck up the computer (well, at the time, this was something I was prone to doing often because I loved messing with Windows' system files :)

[gress]

Your argument seems to be that this makes it harder to engineer the browser, and yet you don't explain that at all.

You simply assert that it would be easier for Mozilla if they split it into a separate piece of software.

I see no specific reason to accept this as true, and you have not provided any.