That previous tweet about the internet of the late 90s got me reminiscing down memory lane about web development in the 90s / early 2000s... (see how many of these you remember)
Front end code used to render *drastically* differently depending on browser and there used to be more even distribution of browser usage. In my first job as a web dev in 2004, we would tear our hair out over IE and Firefox rendering quirks.
Quirksmode.org became the definitive place to look up the answer to the question “why the fuck are you doing that, internet explorer?”
Digg launched in 2004 and had the first mainstream implementation of an Ajax button. It was an epic watershed moment and front end dev became exponentially more fun and innovative from there. Starting with things like Prototype.js leading to Jquery etc.
Early 2000s, mobile phones still had slow downloads and poor rendering capability. You didn’t build “mobile first” or “responsive”, usually you would just build a shitty, basic version of your main site and shove it on a mobile sub domain to be forgotten and ill-maintained 😅
Speaking of maintenance. I worked at a web dev shop in the late 90s before subversion or git were a thing. A coworker irreversibly overwriting your code with their own was actually a thing that could happen. The horror...
In summary: things are so much better for devs now 😅
