The Promise
In 1960, a grad student named Ted Nelson started sketching something he'd eventually call Project Xanadu. His vision: a global network where documents stayed connected to their sources. You could trace any quote back to its origin. Nothing ever broke.
The key idea was transclusion. Instead of copying text, you'd reference it. If the original updated, so did your reference. But Xanadu also had permanent versioning. Every document kept its complete history. Nothing could be altered without a record.
Nelson wanted documents that could update without losing their trail.
Thirty years later, Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web. Simpler than Xanadu. It actually shipped. Documents could live at URLs, accessible to anyone with a link.
Then businesses got hold of it and kept emailing PDFs anyway.
The Problem
When you send an attachment, you create a fork. Your information now exists in two places: the version you control, which keeps evolving, and the version you sent, which is frozen forever.
Your prospect has last month's pricing. Your partner is designing with outdated brand guidelines. Your investor is looking at stale metrics. Every copy drifts further from the truth.
Most of what we share externally keeps changing. Pricing changes quarterly. Teams grow and shrink. Product features ship. Docs evolve. This stuff should reflect what's true now, not what was true when you hit send.
And yet we keep sending frozen copies. Not because we've thought about it. Because attaching a file is easy and updating a website is not.
Why Now?
The attachment persists because the alternative has always been harder. Keeping a website current meant developers, clunky CMSs, and tickets in a queue. With a document, you could just update and resend.
That's the gap we're trying to close at Flint. Web content as easy to update as a doc.
(Yes, we're aware of the irony of building yet another CMS to save you from CMSs.)
We're going further than "easy to edit." Your business already lives in tools with APIs: your CRM, your HRIS, your billing system. Instead of manually remembering to update your site, your pages stay connected to your business data. When your team changes, your team page changes. When your pricing updates, your pricing page updates. You hire someone Monday morning, and they're on your website by lunch. No one touched a thing.
Content that changes can finally be easy to maintain.
The Exception
Not everything should keep changing.
Contracts should be frozen. Invoices should be frozen. Legal filings, board resolutions, signed agreements. The version I have should match the version you have, forever. If it changes, something has gone wrong.
PDFs are good at this job. That's not going away.
The question is whether you're sharing something that's meant to be a snapshot, or something that's meant to reflect what's true right now. Know which one you're sending.
