I'm in web development since 2000s, at that time there was pretty good web authoring tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Everything got complicated because a fundamental limitation of the HTML document model: having dynamic pages.
Imagine creating and maintaining a catalog by having a single .html file for each item in the catalog.
I believe with Dreamweaver MX you could have sort of a template and generate the static pages.
I think this solution wasn't massively adopted because you had to rely on Macromedia server side ( Cold Fusion ).
That was when PHP and ASP entered the scene allowing you to have dynamic pages in a linux or windows server.
At that time, javascript implementations and rendering engines had massive discrepancies, Internet Explorer, Mozilla .., and to solve that emerge the first (that I recall) massively adopted javascript libraries, jQuery & Motools.
Then Ajax[1] became popular because it made posible to interact with the server without refreshing the page, and that's when managing state became a problem in the browser as SPA started to become more and more complex.
It's amusing seeing how we went full circle when SPAs have gotten so heavy and slow that now static page generation it's sold as a killer feature in Nextjs.
When we could do this in 99's version of Dreamweaver with a nice UI.
Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but you get my point, >20 years and see where we are.
$DIVINITY, how I miss Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Dreamweaver was good, but the way Fireworks let you edit images in both bitmap and vector mode and saved it all as extended info in PNG files you were always able to view everywhere…
So sad that Adobe killed them off. I would still be using Fireworks today if I could.
I am still using Fireworks, it's the main reason I'm hanging back on Mac OS Mojave on my personal machine (Catalina drops support along w/ all the 32 bit apps). And I'm waffling between getting a hold of the Windows version and using that indefinitely or just learning something else that has raster / vector combined.
I believe with Dreamweaver MX you could have sort of a template and generate the static pages.
I think this solution wasn't massively adopted because you had to rely on Macromedia server side ( Cold Fusion ).
That was when PHP and ASP entered the scene allowing you to have dynamic pages in a linux or windows server.
At that time, javascript implementations and rendering engines had massive discrepancies, Internet Explorer, Mozilla .., and to solve that emerge the first (that I recall) massively adopted javascript libraries, jQuery & Motools.
Then Ajax[1] became popular because it made posible to interact with the server without refreshing the page, and that's when managing state became a problem in the browser as SPA started to become more and more complex.
It's amusing seeing how we went full circle when SPAs have gotten so heavy and slow that now static page generation it's sold as a killer feature in Nextjs.
When we could do this in 99's version of Dreamweaver with a nice UI. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but you get my point, >20 years and see where we are.