> The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.

And with a language that explicitly does not allow styling, how exactly is "the platform" that takes care of presenting it going to render anything but a single, default style for all content without...reinventing styling?

> One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.

No, one criticism was rather obviously that people don't want to go on the web and see the exact same thing everywhere they navigate to, which is what you get when styling is not possible. However, you seem to be looking at the entire conversation through some strange lens.

> Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.

The creators of a web service/platform wanting to be able to brand their creation and the users of that service simply going with their chosen brand's aesthetics when publishing content are two concepts that can simultaneously exist - in fact, can even be linked.

I am not sure how it has to be explained that people being okay with publishing content on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium without much custom styling is the furthest thing from an indicator that people want Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and every other website to look exactly the same.

I’m starting to feel silly for continuing this thread. I will just conclude with my best understanding of how we are talking past each other.

I think I understand that you are imagining a middleman to be “the platform” even in the context of NAVI/ALFI. I understood NAVI itself to be this platform; much like the Facebook app allows you to publish and browse Facebook content with very little variation in the styling of different content, so NAVI might allow you to browse and perhaps create ALFI content with little variation in styling. You are comparing all the content within Facebook and others to the content on the rest of the web, while I’m talking about how content within a platform doesn’t need to be visually distinct for the platform to be appealing to publishers and readers. You’re thinking of the web as the “platform”, Facebook etc as the “creators” on the platform, and you are grouping people who publish and read on Facebook as “end-users”. I’m thinking of Facebook as the platform, people who publish things on Facebook as creators, and people who read the things published as the end-users.

Sorry in advance if I’ve misrepresented what you’re saying, but this is the best I can do in explaining why we’re unable to understand one another.