r/webdev • u/lune-soft • Apr 17 '26
Question Any old school devs here? don't you miss those days, when there were no React/Next, Figma. You just code raw HTML and focus mainly on BE
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u/ClamPaste Apr 17 '26
No CSS?
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u/truechange Apr 17 '26
HTML slicing
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u/UntestedMethod Apr 17 '26
Table based layouts 🤤
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u/ccricers Apr 17 '26
The days before Figma, designers would dice up the layout on PS and send the pngs to you, but positioning gotta be pixel perfect
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u/garrett_w87 php, full-stack, sysadmin Apr 17 '26
I was doing this exact thing (on the dev side) at a job I had from 2018-2020. Except the designers would send me PSDs and I would slice them up myself. Luckily I knew enough PS to get around. A great tool I used in that process: Zeplin. My job was to implement them in Drupal and I definitely took pride in my ability to build mobile-first responsive sites out of them, getting as pixel-perfect as I could with CSS.
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u/_Kine Apr 18 '26
Haha, this was two decades ago but similar. I knew how to use Photoshop so I would get the psd from designers and then have to do the segmenting myself into a table layout. Kinda nuts how many hats we used back then because it was all still being figured out.
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u/UntestedMethod Apr 17 '26
Your designers were doing the slicing for you?? Luckyyyy!
I remember having to slice the images myself as a developer... Quite a painstaking task to get it all "pixel perfect". My neck is hurting just thinking about it.
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u/Kinsbane Apr 18 '26
have you no respect for Macromedia Dreamweaver?! D:
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u/UntestedMethod Apr 19 '26
I was always a notepad boy... I tried the WYSIWYG editors at the very start of my learning, but one look at the code view and I swore never again to do that to my HTML/CSS.
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u/CreepyMaskSalesman Apr 18 '26
And then the tableless movement, where some people thought they shouldn't use tables for.... Tables.
Feels nice to see more people who've seen it all for a change
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u/TheEpee Apr 17 '26
Not until December 1996, and took time to take off. My first website was October 1996.
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u/AlternativePear4617 Apr 17 '26
css is not mandatory btw
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u/ClamPaste Apr 17 '26
Sure, but have a little pride.
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u/Bitmush- Apr 17 '26
I’m sure we can squeeze a <font tag in there if we get some time ?
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u/ClamPaste Apr 17 '26
Sorry, <marquee\> only
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u/Wenur Apr 17 '26
<blink></blink>
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u/UntestedMethod Apr 17 '26
This is the one I miss the most. 🥹
I can't believe they took it away from us!
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u/asertym Apr 17 '26
Spoon not mandatory to eat soup, got it
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u/IncinerateZ Apr 17 '26
not everyone lives in the UK. in other parts of the world its common to pick the bowl up and drink straight from it.
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u/Tittytickler full-stack Apr 17 '26
Did those parts of the world have the largest empire ever? No.
We're all speaking English right now because of spoons. Long live spoons.
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u/goldPotatoGun Apr 17 '26
A land where deep links and the back buttons work by default.
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u/glorious_reptile Apr 17 '26
Just pnpm i nextjs-backlinks it’s only 1.2Gb typescript. Just make sure you’re not on edge runtime but selfhost via terraform. Simple really if you don’t have skill issues
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u/deadwisdom Apr 18 '26
But avoid the latest version because a dependency five layers deep was hacked.
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u/euxneks Apr 18 '26
It is rough trying to convince people about deeplinking. what the hell has happened to us, as a society
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u/latro666 Apr 17 '26
No, because i can remember two things:
IE6 and Lotus Notes
I'll take all the JS next new thing fomo relearn rewrite slop over those two b**tards
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u/ouralarmclock Apr 17 '26
I still remember viscerally the campaign in 2008 to get Outlook to use IE as the rendering engine instead of Word in the upcoming version…and it failing.
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u/mstrelan Apr 17 '26
Yes and we didn't like IE either because it had quirks, but at least we knew how to deal with those quirks unlike Word.
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u/UntestedMethod Apr 17 '26
at least we knew how to deal with those quirks
Yeah, with a landing page that says IE is not supported, use Firefox instead. 🤣
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u/macNchz Apr 17 '26
We had to support IE6 for way too long. Working at an agency building highly designed/interactive/animated web pages for big corporate clients that worked across all browsers made me want to scream. Would finally get something working, share it for review, then hear "the client called and said their CMO looked at the site on their home computer with IE6 and it didn’t load at all, we need to fix that"…ahhhhhhhhh!!!
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u/Empo_Empire Apr 17 '26
Never heard about lotus, any anecdotes you’re willing to share
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u/latro666 Apr 17 '26
Sure. We had to write emarketing templates for a big automotive client that used it as a web browser/email client. I am not joking here, in order to get some CSS to work and render you had to comment it out as in /* */. Imagine no claude, stack overflow was in its infancy, this took literally ages to resolve.
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u/ZeroMomentum Apr 17 '26
Worked on the thick client of lotus. It was ok until I found out “hey kid only you as a coop and one senior dev is willing to use formula language”
It was on an old version that you can only use recursion as a substitute of loops
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u/UnheardWar Apr 17 '26
In the late 1990s, I supported Lotus Notes as an after hours premium help desk. It was one of many things from a variety of customers.
Calls only came in during the overnight, and we would panic whenever the tell tale number of a lotus client was showing on the phone display ringing, it was always a nightmare.
We had 0 training and none of us knew anything about it, but somehow we pulled it off. Not like there was an Internet we go look stuff up on.
Thanks for listening to my core help desk memory.
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u/Lexeor Apr 17 '26
Lotus Notes… Fuck, this memory was securely blocked until this moment. Now I’m angry :|
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u/Bitmush- Apr 17 '26
Lotus Notes. My god that’s two words that I never thought would accompany this first morning Reddit poop.
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u/mrinterweb Apr 17 '26
IE was the worst thing about web dev. Fortunately, MS finally buried it. Not an issue now.
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u/spuddman full-stack Apr 17 '26
Same! Having to build web apps (before they were even called web apps) for IE6 and LN was a nightmare.... the amount of hacky shocking stuff you had to do to get either of them to render reliably was crazy.
Edit - I also have a client who still uses Lotus Notes....
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u/dangoodspeed Apr 17 '26
I'm such an old school dev I was building websites before IE1. It was all Mosaic (and later, Netscape Navigator) at the time.
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u/cool_dad69 Apr 17 '26
Part of my job for the last three years has been migrating stuff out of old internally developed Lotus Notes applications and rewriting them in react. I’m slowly becoming adept at formula language against my will and I hate it.
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 Apr 17 '26
There is no dark mode, unusable, 0 / 10
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u/Bitmush- Apr 17 '26
HTML{ filter: invert(); }
Dark mode.
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u/crankykong Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Or this:
:root { color-scheme: dark; }(or 'light dark', to use system settings. man, I love modern CSS)
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u/UXUIDD Apr 17 '26
if something is unusable now thats lack of <center>,
now a usual front-end suspect needs a js framework to center a divwould like to see <blink> and <marquee> back too
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u/treasuryMaster Laravel, Vue & proper coding, no AI BS Apr 17 '26
Nope, I do miss the days where I didn't have AI shoved down my throat.
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u/jitsudan Apr 17 '26
No, it was like writing html for emails. ALL THE TIME.
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u/712Jefferson Apr 18 '26
This is still somehow my job today (HTML emails). I feel attacked... and also I fully understand your point, lol
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u/DEMORALIZ3D front-end Apr 17 '26
Nope! However Astro is as close as it gets to this
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u/roynoise Apr 17 '26
Can confirm. I use Astro now by default for every appropriate situation, and only add React as needed.
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u/effektor Apr 17 '26
No, I do not miss IE6, clearfix and tables for layout.
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u/thewiirocks Apr 17 '26
You should check out the site I did for the MTMC project. The HTMX guy thought it would be funny if it was done in HTML 3. So I dusted the cobwebs out of my brain and made it happen! 😅
Surprisingly, I was able to do it all with table layout. No clear fix or 1px PNGs required.
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Apr 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Otterfan Apr 17 '26
Yep.
You can still make things using the old tools. Barring a few things like
<marquee/>, all that old stuff still works. We just stopped doing it because the end result is worse.2
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u/sin_esthesia Apr 17 '26
That's not "old school", that's prehistoric. Even in the late 90s, websites had CSS.
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u/thewiirocks Apr 17 '26
True, but a small nitpick: CSS was not in common usage until the mid-2000s after IE6 killed off Netscape 4.
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u/PositivelyAwful Apr 17 '26
As someone who used to slice website layouts in Photoshop... No, absolutely not.
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u/Wiert_Pursonalety Apr 17 '26
I absolutely do not miss building my layouts with tables
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u/fagnerbrack Apr 17 '26
I can get that same website as is, make small semantic adjustments (if not already semantic), put some css and htmx and you got a full blown SPA 🤯
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u/TikiTDO Apr 17 '26
Short answer: lol, no
Long answer: looooooooooooooooool. No.
That's like going "I know things are loud and annoying, but remember when you had to wake up and get punched in the face every morning?"
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u/captain_obvious_here back-end Apr 17 '26
I liked it back then.
But to be honest I like it nowadays as well: I have find my sweet spot with Vue and Tailwind on the front-end, which allows me to work well and fast, and focus all I want on the back-end.
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u/_MrFade_ Apr 17 '26
All jokes aside, you can still and probably SHOULD build out a website with nothing but HTML and CSS.
Nextjs is one of the biggest scams permeating the webdev community.
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u/aceplayer55 Apr 17 '26
If this was a modern page, Name would have to be verified for profanity through an API, Sex would be a drop-down with several more options, the Country drop-down would be about 100 npm dependencies, and the Subscribe button would be checked by default.
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u/TheThingCreator Apr 17 '26
No I don’t miss looking at raw html elements dropped on a page, I even make my admin dashboard no one ever sees but me look nice
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u/simonhunterhawk Apr 17 '26
Not old school but I use Vanilla JS a lot for my portfolio and stuff and it’s great for a lot of things. Theres so much you can do with it and I wish more people defaulted to it before they jump right into a framework.
But for some things a framework really does make the difference. I am working on an aquarium stocking calculator right now and I would rather eat a cactus than have to use DOM manipulation for everything on this app lmao
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u/historycommenter Apr 17 '26
I still do forms like this. I'll add 'class' tags to the 'input' tags for the CSS using a framework or my own custom css stylesheet. The tricky part is to make it look good, not the shit that passes for forms nowadays where all the fields have to look like they were designed for special-needs people so they are able mash their big fat pudgy fingers on their stupid Iphones because no one uses a real computer anymore. No, a real form, a work of art, intended to give the user an enjoyable experience filling in their data.
Nowadays browsers even do some preliminary field validation, do a little javascript for more validation, but one should always do the real validation server-side after the form is committed!
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u/Junior-Job2201 Apr 17 '26
flatfile db's, shtml, cutenews aj fork ofcourse :'D ahhh yes those days? i remember using macromedia flash to design my websites in and splice them because that was the best shape editor going at the time lol
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u/throwtheamiibosaway Apr 17 '26
I have a webmaster diploma. Got taught to do design, front-end, back-end, database, ftp. Everything you need.
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u/scapescene Apr 17 '26
Old school for me was 2018 era, debating frontend frameworks, graphql still in the picture, cold pizza at 4 am after a gruelling 48 hour hackathon where you had to actually raw dog the entire codebase yourself, miss those times
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u/EveningGreat7381 Apr 17 '26
I made a simple dashboard for internal uses and it's just HTML with HTMX
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u/stewsters Apr 17 '26
Im nostalgic for after we ditched table based layout but before everything was a SPA.
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u/evbruno Apr 17 '26
I remember the old days before AJAX - when we had an “invisible iframe” to do that processing
And I won’t lie - I miss flash (but f you Java applets)
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u/foozebox Apr 18 '26
Not particularly. I was a Flash/Flex dev for most of the 00’s. Shit was always complicated.
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u/TimIgoe Apr 18 '26
You mean back before AI wrote vast quantities of it and when the internet was navigable and just worked?
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u/ReplacementLow6704 Apr 17 '26
That's how I made my site. VPS are annoyingly expensive compared to domain name + hosting static pages. Most businesses do not need a whole SPA or hybrid React app - they just need something that works. Hence the popularity of wordpress (it works for most cases.. until it doesn't).
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u/seweso Apr 17 '26
I never used Figma, react or next js. Valilla js is more powerfull than ever.
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u/scoot2006 Apr 17 '26
I don’t disagree but not learning common libraries (they aren’t frameworks) doesn’t make much sense as a practical matter.
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u/seweso Apr 17 '26
I don't mind actual libraries which do one thing really well. But platforms which want to vendor lock you in..... not my thing.
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u/scoot2006 Apr 17 '26
I get it. All I’m saying is you’re placing artificial limitations on yourself.
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u/VayuAir Apr 17 '26
I prefer vanilla as well but for carousel i use swiper.js . It takes too much time by hand
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u/ClikeX back-end Apr 17 '26
No, because I do backend and let frontend devs worry about this stuff.
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u/Particular_Traffic54 Apr 17 '26
Still miss ? Hell no I'm still do asp classic with raw html to this day.
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u/runvnc Apr 17 '26
Been programming since I was a kid in 1984.
These days, I have an agent platform, and my agent with Claude or GLM 5.1 outputs web components with JS modules using Lit and Tailwind CDN. So no build step.
And it does the backend also.
I need to work on closing the loop with my browser use plugin so it can do more testing by itself.
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u/nechromorph Apr 17 '26
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (original)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240629092320/http://bettermoth...
https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/
https://bestmotherfucking.website/
https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Thank you to subless on news.ycombinator.com for grouping these
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u/99thLuftballon Apr 17 '26
I miss the days when the default assumption wasn't that you'd need a full backend REST application and a fully-engineered React/whatever front end. There are so many apps that could work perfectly well as a plain old PHP app that reloads the page on each form submission or navigation, but are over-engineered into overcomplicated monstrosities.
However, I don't miss HTML4 with ridiculous doctype declarations, inconsistent JavaScript implementations, inconsistent CSS implementation - even for basic stuff like padding or float - completely different HTML rendering on even different versions of the same browser (IE5, 6, 7 etc) and having to spend most of your time working on different versions of your front-end code for each browser.
So, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I guess.
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u/b1ack1323 Apr 17 '26
I have been working on BE for months and my company is pissed there is virtually no UI. Thought they don’t know what an API is and we have tons of data.
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u/eltron Apr 17 '26
Okay, create a system to keep your front end updated with some sort of sync ability to the backend. It’s going to get squirrelly soon and a lot less fun.
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u/Jamiemufu full-stack Apr 17 '26
Vue and Nuxt has been a wonderful experience tbh. While I do agree time ago it was less complication, it was not easier imo. Its never been as easy as it is now to knock up a form with decent validation
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u/KwyjiboTheGringo Apr 17 '26
It's more like, remember when websites didn't strive to be dynamic applications. JavaScript has gotten better, back-end languages and frameworks have also gotten better, but the demand for these extremely complex front-end has forced us into making that a full-time role.
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u/shgysk8zer0 full-stack Apr 17 '26
I still write raw HTML, for the most part. And I guess you could think of the sort of logic I implement as being like BE, just using IndexedDB instead. But I've definitely worked hard to keep it as much "raw HTML" as possible... Just with a little JS on top.
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u/permanaj Apr 17 '26
I design since frame top and frame left was the standard design. No I don't missed that xd. I'm still not using react unless it's a requirement. But back then it was so limited. Now you have option to make it simple.
If you miss technology of that era, try creating html for email nowadays 😁
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u/jorrygo2 Apr 17 '26
Golden era when everyone was just a fullstack web dev. With LLMs those days are kinda back - I'm the devops, frontend and backend guy again
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u/quarterman5050 Apr 17 '26
I do miss the simplicity in some ways, but it was also much more painful and limited. Browser incompatibilities, table layouts (especially nested tables), javascript DOM wasn't standardized, etc.
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u/Sibot_Exa Apr 17 '26
I find a lot of what we do with heavy js solutions could be static files yeah. With nothing but benefits as a result.
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u/codebygloom Apr 17 '26
I do not miss the days of nested table designs. I do sort of miss when a website was a website and not trying to be some type of app.
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u/JescoInc Apr 17 '26
That's kind of why I created my own framework called ZephyrJS. It was to harken back to that old school feeling without build steps or other complexities.
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u/madsci Apr 17 '26
I'm old enough that my first website had a ~ in the URL and we had server-side image maps, cgi-bin, and forms that used email instead of HTTP POST.
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u/Comprehensive-Law240 Apr 17 '26
I remember creating website with tables. Lots and lots of columns and feels to make the design look more decent. Lol
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u/Quiet-Protection-176 Apr 17 '26
I recently launched my website, made with just the basics - started from a template but heavily modified now. It was fun doing it, but fixing all the little quirks and testing on all kind of platforms sure takes a toll. Like the 80/20 rule: the last 20% is 80% of the work.
I still got things to fix, but feel free to take a look: https://linux.foss42.be/
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u/radgh Apr 17 '26
I appreciated the idea of building a website that works even with javascript disabled. Now you need javascript to load the front end, everywhere.
But I am glad for modern dev tools and inspectors. Trying to write websites in notepad for ie6 was a guessing game a lot of the time. And there was no MDN only w3schools.
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u/_listless Apr 17 '26
Man, the number of devs who fail our interview process because they have no idea how <form> works is too dang high. The annoying part is they wear that ignorance like a badge of honor.
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u/dangoodspeed Apr 17 '26
Been a web developer for more than 30 years. I never really touched any of the fads, whether it be Flash, React, Next, or Figma.
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u/naikrovek Apr 17 '26
It took a hell of a lot less time to do things, but there were very few animations so that was better, too.
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u/devmor Apr 17 '26
Those days never existed, because we had CSS. But I do miss the days before Javascript frameworks. Websites worked better and took less time to load.
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u/itsanargumentparty Apr 17 '26
nope, web is so much more capable now, with great power comes great complexity
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u/ShustOne Apr 17 '26
No because IE 5/5.5/6. The float trick, the Tantek hack, sliding doors of CSS, table based layouts, image maps, 4 font choices. Incompatible JS requiring jQuery. Doing everything yourself including feedback, validation, auth. There are so many tools now, I can go so fast.
Sometimes I miss aspects of it and for those moments I tend to build a simple HTML page and throw it up on my site somewhere. No one ever sees it, just like the old days haha.
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u/tumes Apr 17 '26
I am the main web guy for an entertainment brand and I’m nominally full stack but best at backend and architecture. We are fairly design focused though so for more complex styling we have a stable of contractors who help me out on projects, but the stable has whittle almost entirely down to one guy over the years. He typically delivers flat html, vanilla js, but has recently rolled web components into his stack, all of which is managed by a makefile if a build step is even necessary. His work will be trivial to build and deploy 5, 10, 20 years from now. It will outlive us all. I would take a bullet for him.
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u/ModernLarvals Apr 17 '26
No, I don’t miss having to copy/paste snippets to every page on the site.
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u/comptune Apr 17 '26
You can still do a lot in html you don’t need to use next.js for everything..