Hello Neocites!

Last weekend, my nephew mentioned that he wanted to build a website, so I set him up with a Neocities site and showed him how to edit the header. I started feeling nostalgic for those days in the ’90s when I hand-coded HTML websites. I used to have a copy of O’Reilly’s Dynamic HTML book, filled with bookmarks and post-it notes, to help me write CSS/JavaScript/VBScript so websites would work on all browsers. I would often have to write double the code to get it to work on different browsers because they were incompatible.

It was a horrible way to create a website, but I understood what was happening on the page in a deep way. It was like I was a wizard studying tomes of knowledge to craft the perfect spell. Modern frameworks allow us to do so much more, so quickly. That change was good, and it was necessary to transform development from an esoteric craft into an occupation. But it’s just shallow knowledge. Instead of me being a wizard, it’s the framework that casts the spell for me.

Yet even now, as I type this into the Neocities editor, I’m already getting frustrated with manually typing the paragraph and anchor tags and starting to think of more efficient techniques.