Re:PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)
by cronix on Friday May 21, 2021 @07:53PM
(#27241484)
Yes, but at the same time, web development was a much simpler process back then to get into and actually start to learn. No virtual machines to have to learn, or npm, or git, or... just code in php/html in notepad and maybe some raw basic javascript until js frameworks started becoming a thing and upload it via ftp. I mean, you didn't even have css to worry about...you just threw everything into a table! (lol!) There were only a few standard screen resolutions you had to worry about, and only desktops/laptops that were always oriented in the same position (landscape). I'm not saying it wasn't crude, but it was a lot faster to go from knowing 0 to building a dynamic web page with a real visitor counter vs everything extra you have to consider using modern devices and tooling.
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Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a dynamic listing page in PHP that renders an html table from data in MySQL.
Today it still works.
It is important to point out that this simplicity was by design. There was a ton of complex UI frameworks in the 90s, but Tim Berners Lee decided to get away with that complexity. Of course, developers being who they are, decided that simple is not what they wanted, and created probably one of the most complicated development stacks the world has ever seen on the top of the web browser.
I mean, the exact same things work now, a beginner don’t have to use docker, don’t have to care about responsive layouts, etc.
Similarly to how one can start writing python scripts without having to know OOP, maintainability, or even functions. It will suck, but it is a valuable learning step.