The first website was Tim Berners-Lee’s info.cern.ch in 1991. It was plain text with hyperlinks. No CMS. No WYSIWYG. Just a scientist sharing information in the simplest format that could work. The content WAS the code. There was no gap because there was nothing to abstract.
Then came the abstraction layers. FrontPage. Dreamweaver. WordPress. Each one trying to hide the code from the writer. Each one creating a new kind of distance between the person with the idea and the place the idea lives.
Markdown was supposed to fix this. John Gruber created it in 2004 as “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.” The promise: write naturally, publish cleanly. No angle brackets. No databases. Just text files.
Twenty-two years later, markdown succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. It runs half the internet’s documentation. But the original promise — that anyone could write it — quietly broke. Frontmatter. MDX components. JSX expressions. Import statements. Markdown became developer markdown. The tool built for writers became a tool only developers could use.
That is the gap gitpress fills. Not “markdown is broken” but “markdown grew up and forgot who it was for.”
Sean uploaded his first website in 1993, two years after Berners-Lee. He has watched every abstraction layer come and go. Simple solutions with elegant user control is his hallmark. Gitpress is that philosophy applied to the oldest problem on the web: who gets to publish?
The answer should be everyone. The tool should be invisible. The content should be the focus. That is what 1.0 needs to be.