NOTE: This blog post is incomplete. I will be adding more content to it soon.
So, you’re a web developer. Or at least, you’re trying to be one. And like most, if not all of us, you started out by learning HTML and CSS. You built some stuff that made you feel like you could take on the world and perhaps you even played around with Javascript. You didn’t really understand it, or it’s use at the time, but you knew that it existed and all was swell. You were ready! But then you heard about this thing called React and then Vue, Angular, perhaps even Svelte. Perhaps you headed over to youtube to search for all this stuff and you got a thousand different results back. You start seeing content about other frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt.js, Remix, Astro, Fresh and a couple others. And that’s when the imposter syndrome starts to kick in and you realize that you don’t actually know anything.
But how did things get so complicated in the world of web development? Because, truly, to build a website, you only need HTML, CSS and Javascript. In this article, we are going to go back to the basics and try to trace the evolution of web development to see how we actually got here. When the web was invented, it was meant to be something simple. And I think web developers realized this, but then thought that it ought to be more complicated than that.