Me too. First framesets, handcrafted. Then Dreamweaver and Photoshop slicing (forgot what this monstrosity was called). Via PHP portals, CMSes (Drupal!).
Decades later I'm tuning YAML files that trigger ansible runs on CIs that compile docker images in which we embed hundreds of npm packages that get transpiled from typescript. Which gets released to cloud serverless edge thingies that store stuff in a database and on some block storage. All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.
(I'm not exaggerating, but I did pick the worst example. Most of my work is building backend stuff in rust, simple static sites in hugo or jekyll and occasionally sime JS or TS to spice these static sites up with client-side features)
> All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.
Seriously, I think about this quite often. I recently found some old code that I wrote in the early 00s and it was wonderfully simple, and aside from a few visual trends that have changed, it looks pretty damn good. Straightforward layout, good information density, and very clean. The best part is the code is vastly simpler than anything I've seen/built in the last couple of decades (especially since CSS, packers/transpilers, etc started arriving). I grant that there are some good reasons to introduce CSS and divs and all that, and that once we've done that it is inconsistent to have some things done in html and others in css, but sometimes philosophically better isn't better in practice. Sometimes.
Oh yea in hindsight it would have been better to just stay in the editor and write HTML - but I was a kid and Dreamweaver was pretty easy to use.
Although I did hit its limits pretty soon and tried to mess around with the code.
There was something special about being a kid and pushing an update to your site via SFTP on the sidebar in Dreamweaver, then calling or hitting up your friends on AIM/MSN messenger to check it out.
I did something similar with my dad when I was a kid. First basic HTML then Dreamweaver.
A couple years down the road and I’m working at a SaaS company.
Beware.