I started writing for the web shortly after it was invented less than a year for sure I learned to develop by hitting gopher (kind of like the web) documents. It was pretty easy back then. It was just pages, then CGI was added and I started doing CGI/C perl became popular for it and I taught myself Perl. Then the frameworks came out ASP, JSP, ColdFusion etc. So for me it has been an evolution as the industry has evolved. Being in it from the beginning I must say I have very happy to see the web finally morphing from page base to application to a more application centric development model with JavaScript applications. It is what the web should have been a long time ago. But there was a period where people became client phobic due to Microsoft's grip on the client. It stymied the industry by a few years for sure.