I’m actually working on a talk (whew! been a while! kinda feels good!) about just how good the world of building websites has gotten. I plan to cover a wide swath of web tech, on purpose, because I feel like things have gotten good all around. CSS is doing great, but so is nearly everything else involved in making websites, especially if we take care in what we’re doing.
It also strikes me that updates to the web platform and the ecosystem around it are generally additive. If you feel like the web used to be simpler, well, perhaps it was—but it also still is. Whatever you could do then you can do now, if you want to, although, it would be a fair point if you’re job searching and the expectations to get hired involve a wheelbarrow of complicated tech.
This idea of the web getting better feels like it’s in the water a bit…
Chris Ferdinandi in “Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse.”:
What the modern web can actually do, easily and out-of-the-box, is amazing. My friend Sarah Dayan started her career at around the same time as me, and has a wonderful thread on how things have changed since then.
In particular, Sarah talks about the dramatically improved capabilities of the web and expectations from customers and the people who use it.
Modern web technology is lightyears ahead of the late 2000s.
Wes and Scott on Syntax.fm 410 also talk about all kinds of stuff that is great now, from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to tooling and hosting.
Simeon Griggs in “There’s never been a better time to build websites” has a totally different take on what is great on the web these days than mine, but I appreciate that. The options around building websites have also widened, meaning there are approaches to things that just feel better to people who think and work in different ways.
While there’s absolutely a learning curve to getting started, once you’ve got momentum, modern web development feels like having rocket boosters. The distance between idea and execution is as short as it’s ever been.