I still consider those years to be the golden years of the web development. When the fruits of web standards movement started to appear. Alas, then came react and all the good stuff was thrown out of the window. I guess tag soup is palatable, when it is buried deep in node_modules.
Nowadays, I think the opposite. I feel a pang of jealousy and regret when I load a page from before CSS Zen Garden that uses tables for layouts. It still exists and works perfectly. I love how I can automatically date it in my mind, like period furniture or buildings. Unlike the thousands of pages that I made at the time, which are either gone or broken. I yearn for the html files that I lovingly handcrafted as unique pages. I destroyed them myself so that they could use a one-size-fits-all CSS solution. And they could in turn destroy each other with each new site redesign. If I ever get back on the indieweb, I'll be creating each page as a single file and allowing them to age gracefully.
I used to do web dev during the tables-as-layout days. I don’t miss them a little bit. For one, Netscape wouldn’t render anything if the table tag wasn’t closed, and still nothing regardless until it did hit the end tag. And that’s to say nothing of the dodgy layout quirks they had. No thanks.
They work now though. Do you remember all the CSS hacks? All those pages are broken today.
I'm not saying it's better, I'm just saying that I have a lot of regrets about jumping too hard on the bandwagon with a lack of critical thinking, and if I'm honest, evangelism.
