Yes, that Aaron. I also knew Dan Schulz, Dennis Ritchie, Wayne Green, and Ian Murdock.
You can't be in the computer industry for 40 years without meeting and keeping in touch with a few people.
With Aaron we actually met at a gaming convention in Boston where I was running a game of BattleTech and he hopped in. I ended up doing a lot of work for FanPro trying to keep the game alive when FASA collapsed and Wizkids/Microsoft tried to kill it with "clicky-tech" and screwing over the storyline. Ended up having a falling out when new ownership came along.
Was a laugh when a week later we ran into each-other at a tech convention... and the conversation led to the fact I had also met with his father Robert a good number of times when I was working for Wang as we licensed large sections of code for the VS series of machines from Mark Data System's "Coherent" OS.
it makes HTML A LOT simpler than I've always thought.
A lot of that is because the industry that relies on the language doesn't take it seriously. "real" programmers scoff at and ridicule it as "not being a real programming language" and as such don't seem to realize it even has rules, meanings, and structures to be followed.
Worse though is the propaganda machine of frameworks and WYSIWYGS. By using the "glittering generality" of claiming such systems are "easier" they are in fact "name calling" the underlying languages as being difficult. A bald faced LIE.
But it's hard to say if that lie is simply parroted out of ignorance, or intentionally malicious. I prefer to think of it as the former, but far too often the sleazy scam-artistry of the whole thing mated to the well crafted advertising and propaganda machines really make it feel like they know they're lying; anything to make a quick buck, who cares who it takes advantage of.
by merely starting with a thoughtful authoring of contents (mostly writing stuff) with structure in mind
That's the key, HTML is based on professional writing norms, so if you never learned how to make a term paper, whitepaper, business letter, legal document, etc, etc, the concepts of what the tags mean will be quite alien. Again why I find it so disturbing that things I learned in grade school English are now apparently only covered for college level English majors.
I weep for the current state of education.
As such it should be part of the specification to teach that, or at least... well... to borrow from the "redheaded tombstone"
"Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take." -- Thomas Jefferson, private letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825
FTP is not more difficult than logging in a WordPress Admin page, and people already manage files on their computer.
One of the keys is to compare to the tasks "normal" people already know how to do. How is this actually any more difficult or complex? It isn't! People are just told or manage to convince themselves it is. It becomes a belief, and rarely are facts able to sway a believer to any other view.
Maybe this whole thing is more about human problems than technical problems?
It's always a human problem. People are easy to manipulate into doing things in a manner that is against their best interests. Painfully easy, often easier than getting them to do the right thing for the right reasons.
This is made worse when the appearance or illusion of easy makes people do the wrong thing, in the long run screwing them over. Long term many of these alleged shortcuts aren't shortcuts at all, and even when they are it's a matter of how long before it whips around and bites you like the pit bull that's been kicked by its owner one too many times?
It's like the entire world now believes that the web authoring should be just like Microsoft Word
That has been a struggle almost from the beginning, and it's why web developers for most of the late '90's and the entire '00's repeatedly screamed at the top of their lungs "THE WEB IS NOT PRINT!!!". Even as tools like Netscape Composer, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and their ilk repeatedly screwed over site owner after site owner in their ignorance.
Something I personally dealt with as my first pages were built with Netscape Composer back in '97 as I didn't take HTML seriously. Sound familiar? We all get scammed that way at the start. It's why I'm often so vehement in my disregard for such systems and why I hate seeing the exact same mistakes repeated by every new generation of developers.
Sometimes though, you just have to let people fail on their own before they're ready to even consider another way. All real learning is done through failure. Those who have never failed never learn anything.
That such things give a result -- any result -- so 'quickly' dupes people who lack the experience or knowledge into thinking it's an acceptable result because "but it looks how I want". Either not knowing or willfully dismissing the things they cannot see and lack the background to comprehend.
Much akin to putting a birch veneer over cardboard, the manufacturer being too cheap to even spring for particle board or MDF and ignoring any possible issues that could arise because of it. The end consumer has no idea until it breaks.