The dynamic, powerful abilities of JavaScript Style Sheets (1997)

This is a fascinating look back at the beginnings of CSS and JavaScript. Back then it was the wild west and anything seemed possible. I kinda miss those days at times. This was about the time I was in university, just learning the very basic concepts of CSS and JavaScript. Now we have “stacks” that provide so many layers of abstraction that hardly anyone in my field actually knows the underlying core trinity (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML). In fact, many seasoned web app developers I know have no clue how to construct basic tables. I’ve spoken to countless developers (one in fact who has a PhD in GIS) who was not aware that the ONLY thing browsers understand are those three things - there is no other magic under the hood. And don’t get me started on transpiled languages like Coffeescript and TypeScript. I actually had an argument with a developer who thought that browsers natively understood these languages. I had to prove this by showing him in the debugger that the browser only loaded .js files. I’m not saying these tools don’t have merits, but the farther away we get from what browsers actually use, the harder it will be to understand, debug, and fix the products we create.