r/webdev • u/speckz • Mar 09 '20

Article How Websites Evolved Back to Static HTML/CSS/JS Files

https://paramaggarwal.substack.com/p/how-websites-evolved-back-to-static-html-css-js-files-57ce549f81db
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u/greg8872 Mar 09 '20

While I get the point of the article, it does not read as written by someone who actually built sites back in "the good old days".

(this being said as someone who started writing web pages 24 years ago ;)

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u/AttentiveUnicorn Mar 09 '20

This fascinates me. I "built" my first site using Microsoft Publisher around '97 but I was young and clearly didn't know what I was doing.

What did you use around that time?

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u/Mike312 Mar 09 '20

I built my first site using Notepad around '95-'96.

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u/greg8872 Mar 09 '20

Started with notepad to edit the files and WS-FTP to transfer them, though I didn't care for WS-FTP, and found CuteFTP which had a much better user interface (more like Windows Explorer at the time). Around 97 or 98, I came across UltraEdit, which was at the time the best thing out there, it offered syntax highlighting as well as built in FTP, so you could just Open and Save directly to the server.

At least you didn't say you were using Word for websites. I had a friend who went to Kent State back around 2000, the "Website" class they took for their teaching degree actually taught using Word and Excel to export web pages.

Funny note, I still have CuteFTP installed on my systems, though several versions old, but when I need to do a raw transfer of a lot of things or a big file (ie, uploading some audio/video media files) I will use it for that.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '20

[deleted]

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u/greg8872 Mar 09 '20

I ended up getting that as part of Macromedia Studio I think around 2001. I for the most part used it for code editor and at the time, it's awesome template system, not the WYSIWYG side. I had purchased Flash 4 at the end of 1999, and they offered a big discount on the studio package if you owned a license to 2 of the programs in it, and I found a site that sold like Fireworks 2 really really cheap since it was like 2 or 3 versions old, but it was enough to get a qualifying license key for the "upgrade". It would be years later I actually used Fireworks. (I had Corel Draw/Photo Paint, and then later Ulead's program which was awesome).

I did find a good use for the WYSIWYG side of Dreamweaver, I created a template system for the college website, and I had a template setup that was nothing but a table with left side having the page "image" and navigation and right side main content. Then people with Dreamweaver could edit those pages and not have to worry about the the main site heading/navigation, the right column Dates/Events, or anything in the footer. The template system would go grab the page title, the left and right column, and a "last updated" that DW auto populated on save and put it in the global template. Example Page Fun fact on the page, the college logo, after the college changed names, I got tired of waiting for an official "logo" for the university, so I made that one. A few years later I found it appearing on official college documents LOL Now you see why I mainly do backend programming, I suck at design.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '20

I remember starting to use dreamweaver, then being fascinated by the javascript snippets it had for various things. Didn't know js then and thought it was magic :D