> My first website went public in 1994.
So yours was one of the first 2,278 websites? Congrats.
I don't see how any of your accomplishments are relevant, but thanks for sharing.
So your point is that the web when JavaScript and CSS were in their infancy, before web standards existed and were widely adopted, before AJAX and when you had to use "a lot of hacks" to implement streaming... that _that_ web was somehow easier to work with than the modern web? That sounds delusional.
VRML, along with Java applets, ActiveX, Flash, and a myriad other technologies around that time were decidedly not web-native (i.e. a W3C standard, implemented by all browsers). They only existed because the primitive state of the early web was incapable of delivering advanced interactive UIs, so there were competing proposals from all sides. Nowadays all of these technologies are dead, replaced by native web alternatives.
> Better capabilities doesn't always equate to something being objectively better. Particularly if those capabilities are a complete clusterfuck to code for, as the current web standards are.
Which particular standards are you referring to? Native HTML5/CSS3/ES2015+ are stable and well supported standards, and you've been able to target them for nearly a decade now. Their capabilities are obviously much greater compared to the early web, but this is what happens when platforms evolve. If you dislike using them, then I can't convince you otherwise, but I'm arguing against your point that the state of the web was somehow better in the 90s.
> The problem isn't the choice. The problem is that "the right technology to use" is more about what's in vogue at the moment than it is about that's mature.
That's a problem caused by the surrounding ecosystem, not the web. How is this different from VRML being replaced by X3D in 3 years? The good thing is that today you can safely rely on native web technologies without fearing that they'll disappear in a few years. (For the most part. Standards still evolve, but once they're widely adopted by browsers, backwards compatibility is kept for a long time. E.g. HTML4/CSS2/ES5 are still supported.)
If you're talking about frontend frameworks and libraries, again: they're not a standard part of the web, and you don't have to use them. If you do, it's on you to manage whatever complexity and difficulty they bring to your workflow.
> True elegance of an ecosystem isn't about raw capabilities, else we'd still be writing everything in assembly. Its about the ease of which it is to accomplish a task.
I fail to see how all the improvements of the past 20 years made things more difficult. The capabilities have evolved because user expectations have grown, and complexity arises from that. But if you were to build the same web sites you were building in the 90s with modern technologies, like your streaming HTML chatrooms site, you would find the experience vastly easier and more productive. This is an objective improvement.
> jQuery isn't recommended any more.
Because it's not needed anymore, because JS has evolved leaps and bounds since 2006, and implementations in all browsers are standardized. It's still the most popular JS library by far, and used by 77.3% of all websites[1].
> React isn't popular any more.
It's in the top 10 most popular JS libraries. And how come you're judging based on popularity anyhow? Above you were criticizing choosing technologies based on what's "in vogue at the moment" over "what's mature". React is a _mature_ UI library, and is a safe choice in 2023, unless you're chasing the latest hype train.
> You talk about "decades" and cannot list a single framework that is still in widespread use and more than 10 years old.
JavaScript frameworks as a concept are barely a decade old. React isn't a framework, it's a library. Like I said, jQuery is the most popular library and is 17 years old. Underscore (2009), Bootstrap (2011), Lodash (2012), and many more, are still in widespread use today.
But my point is that _today_ you don't strictly need any of them to build advanced interactive experiences. If you do want to, though, there are many to choose from that simplify development of modern UIs, without being a "clusterfuck" to work with IME. htmx, Lit and Tailwind are all lightweight, well maintained, and help with quickly iterating without resorting to full-blown frameworks. If you do want a framework, Svelte is now 7 years old, so quite mature, and is very pleasant to use.
> Yes it is. Simply saying it isn't doesn't disprove my point.
I thought the fact that you're reading and typing this on a forum built with simple HTML, CSS and minimal amounts of JS would make this self-evident. (The fact it uses a bespoke backend is irrelevant; this could just as well be served by a mainstream backend stack.)
But to save you a web search, here are other examples courtesy of ChatGPT[2].
> As someone who's written software in more than a dozen different languages for well over 3 decades, every time I come back to writing websites I always feel disappointed that this is what we've decided to standardise on.
Nice humblebrag again, but if you'd be willing to accept that the web has grown exponentially since the days you were building websites before JavaScript and CSS existed, that there are orders of magnitude more web developers and software now than back then, and that the core web technologies are more mature and stable than they've ever been, then you'd be able to see that the status quo is not so bad.
I have more issues with the modern state of centralized mega-corporations and advertising ruining the web than anything I can complain about the technology itself. But that's a separate topic.
[1]: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library
[2]: https://chat.openai.com/share/6b15c659-e47c-4b64-aace-f8d6e9...