There was a time when building a website felt straightforward. You'd write some HTML, add PHP for dynamic content, sprinkle in jQuery for interactions, upload it to your server, and you were done. No package managers, no build processes, no debates about hydration strategies. Today, creating even a simple webpage often involves configuring multiple tools, managing dependencies, and navigating complex development workflows. How we got here? What did we lose along the way?

I recently tried to revive a simple React project from 2015. What should have been a quick update became a multi-day archaeology expedition:

  1. Running npm install revealed dozens of security warnings
  2. Half the dependencies were no longer maintained
  3. The React version was so old it predated the current documentation
  4. Updating React required rewriting significant portions of the codebase

The solution? I converted it to static HTML and CSS. The entire process took about an hour, the site loads instantly, and it will run unchanged for years.

The Era of Simplicity: PHP, jQuery, and Getting Things Done

I don't want to romanticize the past, but building small projects required less effort. Sure we have AI to build boilerplate code, but PHP and jQuery were the pragmatic workhorses of the early web. They prioritized solving problems over perfect architecture.

When PHP 7 was released, Rasmus Lerdorf joke that even your bad code is fast now. That's because the goal wasn't to make a perfect tool for programmers, instead it was to make tools for people to build websites.

PHP was refreshingly straightforward. Need to display database content? Write a query, loop through results, and output HTML. Want to handle form submissions? Process $_POST data directly. You can build a quick, reliable, and secure website without including a single dependency.

jQuery solved the browser compatibility nightmare that plagued early JavaScript development. Instead of writing different code for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, you could write $('#element').fadeIn() and trust it would work everywhere. It made JavaScript accessible to developers who just wanted to add some interactivity without becoming browser compatibility experts. In fact, it was very popular in our marketing department.

Modern Development: Powerful but Complex

Today's web development tools are undeniably more powerful, but they've also introduced significant complexity:

The Modern Stack Requirements:

  • HTML becomes JSX with component hierarchies and prop validation
  • CSS evolves into CSS-in-JS, utility frameworks, or sophisticated design systems
  • JavaScript requires transpilation, bundling, tree-shaking, and often a full build pipeline
  • Development involves package managers, linters, test runners, and deployment workflows

Modern projects often include dozens or hundreds of dependencies. Each brings its own maintenance burden: security updates, version conflicts, and the inevitable deprecation cycle. A simple button component might pull in multiple libraries, each with their own dependencies.

The Reinvention Cycle

Interestingly, many modern solutions solve problems we've solved before, just with additional layers:

  • Server-side includes (<?php include 'header.php'; ?>) become component imports with build-time processing
  • jQuery's $.ajax() becomes fetch() wrapped in state management libraries
  • Simple CSS becomes processed through multiple build steps to achieve similar results

We're not necessarily solving new problems. We're solving old problems with new constraints and capabilities.

Along the way, we started paying the cost:

  • Higher barrier to entry for new developers
  • Increased project setup time and complexity
  • More moving parts that can break
  • Dependency management overhead
  • The paradox of choice among competing tools
  • After a few years, you can't deploy your code unchanged

The web development community has gained incredible capabilities, but we've also made simple things more complicated than they need to be. There's value in remembering that sometimes the straightforward solution. PHP processing a form, jQuery handling a click event, or even plain HTML and CSS. This might be all you need.

The best tool is the one that solves your problem efficiently without creating new problems. Whether that's a modern React application or a PHP script from 2010 depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish.

The web became amazing because it was accessible to anyone willing to learn HTML and try things out. As we build increasingly sophisticated tools, we should remember to keep that accessibility and experimental spirit alive.