> With this block madness it turned from a "semantic publishing platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
But here you're wrong. There is now more semantic information available to content-transforming plugins, not less, thanks to the block editor.
The content is still stored as HTML in post_content (which they do to support exporting the content as HTML), but because of its annotations, you can get the entire block parse tree from a single function call, on the server side:
So for the first time, the semantics of page content are exposed in a way that does not involve trying to parse chunks of HTML yourself (except the "classic editor" block if you want to parse into that).
> It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to disrupt it.
There's already been a hard fork of WP that might suit you:
Why on earth should I include these very beautiful and also very random bird illustrations and colors and typography into my website?
Are these "pattern" in the sense of reusable solution to common problems or just random and non-consistent design blocks?
Also, why on earth should I control border-radii, gradient, colors for every single block in the editor?[0][1]
This is complete madness. For two reasons at least: One, styles should be defined at least on a global level, using tokenized values and possibly exposed only to users with higher capabilities (designers).
Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii or gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random fashion on the same page, or even on the same website, is a recipe for a visual disaster.
Yes, you're right about how the semantic data may be stored. Everything else? I can still see a "lousy PowerPoint for the web" everywhere.
What's worst, is that they are pushing these bad design decisions really hard. Breaking existing websites in production. Maybe they'll make it right someday, at least I hope so, but it will take years time. This is why, as I said, all of this should be at least opt-in.
> Are these "pattern" in the sense of reusable solution to common problems or just random and non-consistent design blocks?
They are intended to be the former but I'm sure they will include the latter in some cases; WP is used by really everyone.
(The bird illustrations are just demonstrations of the content pattern, are they not?)
> Also, why on earth should I control border-radii, gradient, colors for every single block in the editor?
Personally I don't, but there may be reasons to do that. And it's important to note that WP now sees its main competition as platforms that do offer that. But one assumes those features can be switched off by theme editors; many aspects of Gutenberg can be (though it's three years since I did a serious Gutenberg site build so I might be out of date. You can certainly disable whole blocks, build pre-defined block styles etc).
> Two, authors and editors should focus on content, not styling. Many of them are unable to take rational design decisions. Giving them the power of styling border radii or gradients on multiple buttons/elements in a random fashion on the same page, or even on the same website, is a recipe for a visual disaster.
Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering at users for wanting to make their own creative choices, that is only your call to make when you're managing the system, right? How is any of this different to the any number of plugins or TinyMCE Extended features that were available in WP before? At the end of it is still someone's creative discipline; nothing has changed and CMS developers should be a bit cautious about saying "no, you can't ever do that, because it's tasteless".
(Edit to add: one of the real problems WP will face if they took a taste-first approach is a proliferation of hacky, ugly blocks that exist simply to serve users who reject that particular approach. It is far better to have a generic, configurable interface for core block styles that can be locked down on a site-by-site basis than to encourage a world of hacks and workarounds)
It's still becoming more structured, not less. And a fork like ClassicPress won't change things.
If you really think all these things need to be able to be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
> And it's important to note that WP now sees its main competition as platforms that do offer that.
I don't know about every other platform, but Squarespace for example is doing really well in bringing design consistency.
> But one assumes those features can be switched off by theme editors;
Maybe you can shut the light off but at the moment it is really hard or even impossible to tune them.
> Putting aside the fact that you're basically sneering at users for wanting to make their own creative choices, that is only your call to make when you're managing the system, right?
No, it's not about control. It's neither about taste. Individual users can do whatever they want. There are more complex situations where some random guy will use the largest font size in bold red for things he think are important and you still have responsibility for that output. In general, Gutenberg also broke the WP user capability system, so there is still work to do to fix it.
> If you really think all these things need to be able to be locked down tight: make the case, submit the patches?
Yes and I assure you I'm not the only one, but it's not something you can fix with a patch. There were really constructive discussions that led to the Global Styles concept for example. But oh boy it takes time. There is work on a theme.json standard that is still an undocumented, change-breaking mess.
And then, on the next update they put some 50kb of useless svgs in your html...
With this block madness it turned from a "semantic publishing platform" to some lousy PowerPoint for the web.
It's time for a hard fork, or for some new project/idea to disrupt it. It may take some time, but this is something inevitable at this point.
[0]: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/38299