…but some of us were watching | Knut Melvær<br>Skip to main contentA response to The Descent, the generated frontend history that entered my feed recently. It skipped the CMS decade, Flash, and everyone who was in wp-admin in 2008 (like I was).

ContentsSide note: who am I even arguing with?<br>The pre-2006 web dev<br>Frameworks before there was "frameworks"<br>Web 2.0 and CSS patterns maturing<br>And then there were CMSs!<br>Server(less) hosting and git-driven deployment<br>So, full circle?<br>AI solidifies web tech, but creates new itches<br>A field kit of questions<br>The blog post "The Descent — What Happened to the Frontend While You Weren't Watching" has swung past in various feeds lately. Many of my fellow web developers seem to relate to it, probably because we feel some nostalgia for what now feels like simpler times (spoiler: they weren't).<br>The post opens with this statement:<br>In 2008 you saved a file called index.html, dragged it onto an FTP client, and watched a little progress bar crawl to the right. When it finished, your website existed.<br>Well. In 2008, I had left this practice behind and was customizing WordPress templates for my clients, and I was far from the only one. It let us ship websites where the people we built them for could publish content without anyone dragging a file into a remote folder. Yes, I used FTP to upload the CMS files, but also stuff like phpMyAdmin to manage the MySQL database that made the whole thing work.<br>As someone who wrote an index.html and put it on the web with WS_FTP in 1998, it feels like the piece leaves so much of the story out of the picture.<br>Like FrontPage and Dreamweaver as tooling? How Flash was the means of giving folks app-like experiences on the web, and how the iPhone killed it? What platforms like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Neopets did in terms of empowering folks to use CSS and HTML to customize their corner of the web without having to know about FTP at all? All the community work that went into making semantic HTML happen?<br>The historical lacunas aside, which might be forgivable given the focus on "tooling," not zooming out is also why the post ends up too simplistic in its thesis that "every tool is scar tissue over a real wound," and that "somebody hit a genuine problem, built a fix, and the fix created the next problem, which got its own fix" is (the only) reason we're here.<br>My goal in this post is not to provide the complete and canonical history of web development and frontend tooling. Nor to claim that I have the perfect synthesis of why we are where we are. But by skimming through what went unmentioned in "The Descent," I think I can give enough proof that we have the tooling we have not just because "new tooling creates new problems solved by new tooling, rinse and repeat," but because of the evolution of the web platform itself (specifications, browser capabilities, devices), culture and conversations (conferences, industry blogs, forums), socio-economic drivers (scaling engineering orgs, what gets invested in), and mental models within engineering practice (DRY, KISS, avoiding technical debt).<br>In my experience, “the pendulum” is more like a flat circle, and we have been everywhere on it, all at once.<br>#Side note: who am I even arguing with?<br>Before I dive into the depths of history so we can ascend back to enlightenment, it should be said, as I'm typing this post out with my feeble digits like it's 2023, that the blog post reads like it was generated by Claude. The site's own footer confirms it had a hand in it: "Made by David Poblador i Garcia (and Claude, too)." It's an impressive output, probably shaped through a lot of back and forth, and to be fair, a decent descent. But it does leave me wondering if I’m just arguing with someone's output that they kinda didn’t think that deeply about?<br>Well, it has been read enough and created conversation, so maybe it doesn't matter much where the authorship and thinking start and stop.<br>I genuinely[1] don't know how to feel about it though. Nor am I on a moral high horse here, I too, am guilty of using Claude to write and being more hands off than I probably should’ve.<br>#The pre-2006 web dev<br>You can certainly peel the historical layers of frontend and web development back beyond the web itself, to ARPANET, SGML, Usenet, and whatnot, but for the sake of simplicity, let's wake up in the early 2000s. The grown-ups of the early web already scarred by the dot com bubble.<br>Yes, static authoring of HTML and CSS files, or dynamic generation with PHP and Perl, are things people do. But they're also building websites with FrontPage and Dreamweaver as their frontend tooling. The desktop software gives them UI affordances for handling templates and content at scale (a Dreamweaver template even had locked regions and editable regions, which is a schema if you squint). We're also using framesets, iframes, and Macromedia Flash™ to provide the "fetch new content without reloading the whole page" experience we associate with Single Page...