I’ve been doing web development since the mid 90s. In the beginning it was just plain html files that you would manually ftp (not even sftp) to a web server. Later it was html, css, and JS - but it was still a manual process. Eventually jQuery was added to help since nobody was standards compliant and instead of writing different css/JS for every browser, you just used jQuery and it took care of making it work on every browser. Files were still manually uploaded to the web server. Then came ES5. That led to an enormous floodgate of complexity. Suddenly you were expected to have a build system to transpire code to match the lowest browser specs you would support. Then came more complex front end code via react/Vue. Then came typescript. Then came pipelines like Jenkins. And docker. And serverless architecture. And it is absolutely mind boggling how complicated web development is today when It is still just plain html, css, and JS being delivered to the browser.
You can still type html css js and push it via php or cgi.
Not just theoretically, but literally. I started an internal dashboard with just flask and bootstrap. When I needed some nice interactive graphs, I found dC.js and added it.
Then my forms got more and more complex and I just added Vue.js to the same pages. I now got extremely interactive and intuitive static html pages that interacted with the server side only when they needed to. All in one file.
Now my team is starting to take over the project and our form has 100s of fields, so we are migrating to a proper build system with svelte.
I have done amateur web dev from 1997 till now. It has never been easier to choose the system with the correct amount of complexity and boilerplate you want to be maximally productive.
