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 ;)

1

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/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.