I agree with you on some points, and disagree with you on others.<p>&gt; The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper.<p>Absolutely!<p>&gt; The open web has nothing to do with &quot;view source&quot;. It never did. &quot;View source&quot; just makes debugging easier, it&#x27;s a technical solution to a technical problem.<p>I think &quot;view source&quot; was essential to the web we have today. It&#x27;s not just a technical solution to a technical problem - it&#x27;s an accidental UI&#x2F;defaults solution to a social problem we didn&#x27;t realize we had.<p>(note that, in general, this applies to the web of maybe 15~20 years ago. Geocities, inline styles, table-based layout, the works)<p>The problem, namely, is how to educate the general internet-using populace on the means of content-creation, and encourage them to actually create. If different companies can put out their web sites or their technologies with slightly reduced barriers on innovation, sure, that&#x27;s kinda nice I guess. But, the web reaches it&#x27;s true potential when the average nobody uses it not just to consume, but to create, produce, and publish.<p>There&#x27;s a very small subset of the population that can just read an HTML spec (or at best, a tutorial), and actually churn out a working web page at all. Most people like to learn implicitly, by example and by imitating. With &quot;view source&quot; available, any web page you see is an example to learn from - or a code snippet to take, edit, and make your own.<p>---<p>now-a-days, we&#x27;re up to our ears in HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS classes, tutorials, etc., reasonably priced hosting, code snippets, the works. And yet, a smaller percentage of the internet population (and, I think, a smaller absolute number of people) actually create their own website.<p>Sure, there&#x27;s more technology to grapple with, and the bar has been raised on what constitutes a &quot;good&quot; website the author would be satisfied with, but I think the real failure is that it&#x27;s pretty much impossible to read the source of any interesting, non-trivial website.