inessential by Brent Simmons

Templates and weblogging

I remember back in the day—1996 or thereabouts—when Frontier’s HTML framework was new, it seemed to lots of people that the idea of using templates to build websites was an idea from outer space.

(Frontier wasn’t the only system to use templates, I’m sure, it just happens to be the one I used and later worked on.)

The attitude of lots of people I talked to was that multi-file search-and-replace was all they’d ever need.

I think weblogging changed that. There are now lots—hundreds of thousands? I don’t know—of people who have some experience using templates to publish on the web (whether they’re using UserLand software or Blogger or Movable Type or whatever). They still might not be using templates for their entire sites, but at least it’s no longer a completely alien idea.

Anyway, this is just an observation. I think it’s cool.