When we “view source” our modern web applications, the code looks nothing like what we originally wrote. At a minimum, it’s gone through linting, transpilation, obfuscation, minification, and bundling. And in order to build our beautifully designed apps with sophisticated interactions, we leverage the latest features in HTML, CSS and JavaScript available in our modern evergreen browsers.
However, when web development was in its infancy two decades ago, things were drastically different. Sites had hit counters, used frames for navigation, and were updated manually via FTP. We used the blink tag and scrolling marquees! Let’s take a walk down memory lane (or have a history lesson) and have some laughs cringing at how sites looked, how they were built, and the rudimentary tooling we had to develop them.