> I think you're misremembering then. There _was_ no web development to speak of in the early 90s. The web was largely a niche technology until the mid-90s. Mosaic released in January '93, Netscape in October '94, and IE in August '95. By the end of '93, there were a total of 130 websites[1], most of them from universities and research centers. By the end of '94, a whopping 2,278 websites. JavaScript first appeared in September '95 (Netscape), and CSS in August '96 (IE).

My first website went public in 1994. Before then I was writing stuff purely for a private intranet. So I'm definitely not misremembering.

By 1995 I had released an online RPG (it was very rudimentary but it worked).

By around 1997 (give or take, this was a hobby project so cannot remember the exact year) I had a full 3D web site available via VRML. Wasn't much of a success because most people didn't have 3D capable graphics cards back then. I think it was a couple of years before 3D accelerators became the norm.

1998 I was experimenting with streaming HTML chatrooms (that required a lot of hacks to get working because we are talking pre-AJAX here) and bots written in Perl.

For most of the 90s I was on the cutting edge of web technologies. So I remember the era well.

> This is without a doubt, an objectively better state than what we had in the 90s

Is it though? Better capabilities doesn't always equate to something being objectively better. Particularly if those capabilities are a complete clusterfuck to code for, as the current web standards are.

True elegance of an ecosystem isn't about raw capabilities, else we'd still be writing everything in assembly. Its about the ease of which it is to accomplish a task. I'd argue that the current web isn't elegant in the slightest. A polished turd is still a turd.

> Of course, actually relying on external dependencies would make your life easier, so the difficult task is picking the right technology to use from a sea of poorly built and maintained software. This is the drawback of a platform exploding in popularity, but it doesn't say anything about the web itself.

The problem isn't the choice. The problem is that "the right technology to use" is more about what's in vogue at the moment than it is about that's mature.

When you look at other popular technologies, you still have choice but there's also mature stacks to choose from. The moment anything web related becomes "mature" (and I used this term loosely here) the next generation of developers invent something new.

> jQuery appeared precisely as a response to the lackluster state of JS in browsers, and to make development easier by not worrying about browser incompatibilities. My point is that up until then, web development _was_ a shitshow.

It was. And it's a bigger shitshow now. Glad you finally understand the point I'm making.

> Funny how I can disagree with a "fact" then...

That doesn't mean I'm wrong ;)

> It's really not, unless you're chasing the latest hype train. jQuery is 17, React is 10, Vue is 9, etc. And like I said, you don't strictly need any of it. If you write standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JS, it will serve you for decades to come with minimum maintenance. You've been able to do the same since arguably the late 2000s.

jQuery isn't recommended any more. React isn't popular any more. Vue is probably the only item there that has merit and that's still less than a decade old.

You talk about "decades" and cannot list a single framework that is still in widespread use and more than 10 years old.

> Many people do.

Many people also solder their own CPUs. But that doesn't mean anyone does it for stuff that actually matters.

> That is factually not true.

Yes it is. Simply saying it isn't doesn't disprove my point.

> I'm not saying it is. My point is that you can still do that today.

And you can still hand solder your own CPU today. But that doesn't many anyone does that for professional sites.

The only reason people stick up for the current status quo is because they either don't know any better or Stockholm syndromed into living with the status quo.

As someone who's written software in more than a dozen different languages for well over 3 decades, every time I come back to writing websites I always feel disappointed that this is what we've decided to standardise on. You're points that its capable aren't wrong. But that doesn't mean it's not still a shitshow. Raw capability alone simply isn't good enough -- else we'd still be writing all of our software in assembly.