1996 was the beginning of the chaos. We went from a document that the user's browser parsed and styled to a free-for-all of website designs glued together on construction paper. Accessibility took a step back. You now needed a graphical desktop to view the web. Page content was no longer machine readable and became less portable. Now in a world of dynamic page content generated by javascript you need a v8 browser in crawlers just to index page content.

My career has followed some of that journey, and I also have come back to using Alpine, HTMX, and a server side rendering for SPA-like apps. Some pages are just almost all HTML, and just use HTMX to switch the client content without a page load.

I find it refreshing to write, not generate, HTML and CSS, and then sprinkle some JavaScript for interactivity.

I've found hugo to be rather amazing in generating static HTML and CSS (converting either HTML or Markdown templates into regular HTML).

I started out my personal website as:

• static HTML
• an SPA (yes, the archived version still works!)
• back to static (hand-written) HTML
• expanded the hand-written HTML
• and expanded some more
• until I had to generate the HTML via hugo, because the HTML headers were getting out of sync

PS: Have you ever seen TheNet (1995)?

PPS: All the HTML is pretty much all Semantic HTML, instead of Twitter's div>div>div>div>div