Twenty Years of Front-End Mayhem (and Why I Still Love It)

Sometimes I find myself tangled in some overengineered state management solution or wondering why I need three different tools just to style a button—and in those moments, I stop and think about where it all began.

My first website was on Geocities, back when web pages were a chaotic mess of neon backgrounds, Comic Sans headers, and animated GIFs of dancing hamsters. No code editor. Just drag, drop, and hope. I was basically playing with digital refrigerator magnets and calling it "design."

Later, I discovered MS Front Page and got my first taste of customizing websites. And then Notepad++ showed up, and that's when things got real. I started writing HTML by hand—inline <font> tags, inline style attributes (before CSS was really a thing), and pages built with table layouts so deeply nested they'd make an archaeologist weep. Notepad++ would eventually lead to Dreamweaver, which had a lot of buttons and a lot of "WYSIWYG" but was still just a fancy way to write HTML and CSS. I was convinced I was a wizard.

Want a rounded corner? Slice it in Photoshop and jam the pieces into a table. Want layout control? Hope your image spacer trick doesn't break in Netscape. Responsive design? Semantic markup? Accessibility? Those were not words we used.

The Weird Years: DHTML, JavaScript, and Browser Hackery

We were inventing as we went. DHTML sounded cool but was mostly just JavaScript trying to make stuff move without setting the browser on fire. VBScript made a brief, confusing appearance. JavaScript itself was inconsistent and cranky—every browser had its own interpretation of what document.getElementById() was supposed to do.

And speaking of browsers, it was a warzone out there. IE6 vs. Netscape Navigator, later joined by Firefox, Safari, and eventually Chrome—each with its own rendering quirks. Let's not even talk about Opera, or worse, Opera mini. We were writing conditional comments in our headers to serve different CSS to different browser, using CSS hacks galore, vendor prefixes, and praying to the Box Model gods. Cross-browser compatibility wasn't a goal—it was a miracle.

Then jQuery Saved Us All

When it came to making sites interactive I dabbled in MooTools & jQuery, but jQuery was the one that stuck. Suddenly, you could do real things with just a few lines of code. Hide stuff, animate things, send AJAX requests without refreshing the page—it was like discovering fire. We built carousels, modals, and dynamic interfaces that felt almost… modern.

At the same time, we started actually caring about how we built things. And that's where the real turning point happened: web standards.

The Rise of Web Standards (aka: Someone Finally Cleaned Up This Mess)

Somewhere in that sea of <div class="wrapper-inner-block clearfix">, we started to realize that maybe we needed rules. Jeffrey Zeldman helped kick off the standards movement with Designing with Web Standards, waving the flag for sanity. And slowly but surely, browser vendors got on board.

We got proper doctype declarations, a semi-consistent box model, and—most importantly—semantic HTML. No more wrapping everything in anonymous <div>s. We had structure: <header>, <nav>, <main>, <section>, <article>, <aside>—tags that actually meant something.

This shift was more than just cleaner code. It laid the foundation for everything good that's come since.

Accessibility became achievable without jumping through flaming JavaScript hoops. Screen readers could finally interpret page structure. Tab order made sense. The internet became more usable for more people.

SEO improved for sites that were adopting these standards—especially in the eyes of Google. Search engines understood what was on the page without guessing. Semantic tags meant content could be crawled, indexed, and surfaced more accurately.

Performance got a boost too. We stopped loading jQuery just to toggle a class or animate a div. Native CSS stepped up—transitions, animations, flexbox, grid, position: sticky, aspect-ratio—we started doing more with less.

Web standards reduced the chaos and let us build things that were faster, more inclusive, and easier to maintain.

Tools like CSS Zen Garden by Dave Shae drove this point home. One HTML file, infinite designs—purely controlled with CSS. No JavaScript. No layout tables. Just style layered on top of structure. It felt like magic.

Tools, Data Formats, and the Rise of the Dev Stack

Before JSON, there was XML—and if you never had to deal with it, consider yourself blessed. (Technically, there was SOAP, too, but I won't pretend I understood what was going on there.) Anyway. XML was our early attempt at passing structured data between systems. It was rigid, wildly verbose, and felt like filling out paperwork in code. Everything had to be wrapped in tags like <name> and <value>, and you just crossed your fingers your parser didn't choke. It technically worked… but barely. And don't even get me started on namespaces.

Eventually, we moved past XML (thankfully) and embraced JSON—simpler, cleaner, and way more portable. Sharing data got easier. Reading it didn't make your eyes bleed. Progress.

RSS feeds let us syndicate content. Sitemaps became sacred for SEO. The web was starting to grow up. And honestly, so were we.

We left Dreamweaver behind and picked up editors like Sublime, Atom, and finally VS Code. Our efficiency began to boom with the addition of autocomplete features, and fancy plugins like Emmet that came with these new editors. We started versioning with Git (instead of filenames like final-final-this-one.html and final-no-for-real-this-time.html). We embraced responsive design (thank you Ethan Marcotte) and wrote actual mobile-first CSS. We ditched image spacers, adopted SVGs and optimized things like icons and repeating background gradients with CSS sprites.

We built things with Sass and PostCSS, and used preprocessors like HAML or pug, or mustache. We created design systems and figured out how to keep our styles from imploding with methodologies like BEM and ITCSS.

I dipped into the back end for a while—PHP, WordPress, Drupal, and even Rails. I liked Rails—I still like rails quite a bit! It was clean and friendly. But the front end kept evolving, and I kept getting pulled back in.

The JavaScript Era (and the 47,000 Frameworks It Brought With It)

The web turned into an app platform. Suddenly, everyone wanted SPAs (Single Page Apps). Ember and Backbone kicked things off, followed by Angular, React, Vue, and a whole ecosystem of component libraries and state management patterns that still make my brain itch.

We chased performance with Grunt, then Gulp, then Webpack, then Vite, (just to name a few) and spent hours fighting build configs that refused to work for reasons known only to the JavaScript gods.

We started testing our stuff—Jest, Cypress, Playwright—and tracking user behavior with Hotjar, Segment, Google Analytics, UTMs, AB tests, Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, and more acronyms than I care to remember.

Design tools changed, too. We went from Photoshop to Sketch to Figma, and suddenly everyone could work on the same file at the same time without emailing PSDs like animals.

We embraced accessibility (a11y) and internationalization (i18n) because we should. And because standards and tooling finally made it possible to do so without three extra libraries and a handwritten tutorial.

Then came JAMstack, serverless, micro frontends, headless CMSs, HTMX/Hotwire, web components, and even Tailwind CSS (which I hated until I didn't). We started deploying with Netlify, documenting design component libraries with Storybook, writing our docs in Markdown, and shipping full-stack apps without touching a server. I still prefer to "never touch a server" if I can help it.

At some point we decided that we had enough of the dynamic typing that is JavaScript and embraced TypeScript, and I'm still not sure if that was a good idea or not. But it's here to stay.

And Somehow… We're Still Here

It's easy to look at the modern stack and feel overwhelmed. Everything changes. Constantly. You finally learn something, and then it's out of date. But when I zoom out, I can see the pattern: we've gone from chaos to coherence. From hacking things together to building real, accessible, performant experiences for real people.

And a lot of that—maybe most of it—goes back to the push for web standards. That was the turning point. That's what made everything else possible.

I'm not writing this to teach anyone anything. I'm just a guy who's been in the trenches long enough to appreciate how far we've come, and how weird (and occasionally wonderful) this ride has been.

So if you're feeling overwhelmed or burnt out or just confused about why your z-index still doesn't work—hey, same. But stick around. Because for all the chaos, this stuff is still kinda fun.

And let's be real: the next twenty years? They're going to be even weirder.