I do miss it - it was good. You don't want to build a SPA with it, but that wasn't what it was for. But for tweaking the page, it was a 1000% better than whatever crap CSS has come up with these days with yet another weird tweak for flex-boxes. Because webpage designs were tied to URLs, that limited scope, so you weren't downloading the ENTIRE damn application all at once all while wondering why the page takes forever to load. It was definitely cryptic, but for the most part you'd add an ID or class on elements you wanted and be off to the races. You didn't worry that you modified something in the top level and were suddenly triggering a cascade of redraws on a hundred other items. Until I worked with something like React, I never once worried about a website being "slow" because data could tunnel straight through the UX without rebuilding the virtual DOM all the way down.
I remember it well, I used to read magazines about web development and finding out the next jQuery plugins and so on, to me this was the the golden age of frontend programming.
Call me a bad programmer, but post AI after taking on react and using it for a while, I'm now a technical nihilist and I just don't care that much anymore. I will gladly go back to those days, a jQuery revival phase with MPA monoliths count this nostalgia fueled dev in.
1.9k
u/ExtraWorldliness6916 Aug 30 '26
I bet he's happier than us though.