By Harry Roberts CHAPTER 1I remember one tale from an older developer, who built a site in a mix-
ture of tables and CSS in the hope of making the transition more gradual.
Despite how long the transition did (or didn’t) take, people by and large
seemed to love CSS. This was a huge change in development and produc-
tion workflows that almost everyone — certainly everyone I know person-
ally — welcomed with open arms. CSS could let us do so much more than
we were used to: we could build things faster, smarter, bigger and better.
We embraced the change and things were better for it.
Despite these shifts in technology, though, websites were still typically
quite small affairs. A dozen years ago, websites were often just a few pages
used to show off pictures of your cat and auto-play your favourite Rush
song; now websites are often hundreds, if not thousands of pages in size
and generate tens of billions of dollars a year.
The move from tables to CSS was a change of technology, but there
was very little change in landscape; sites fifteen years ago were typically
all relatively similar in size and purpose, regardless of what they were built
upon. The Web then was a much humbler little place, and the advice we
were given regarding Web standards and CSS and semantics and clean
code and avoiding extra markup and classes held true. But that was then;
the Web has changed — and it is still changing — but I worry that we’ve
stopped changing with it. Our best practices were overhauled around a
decade ago but we don’t seem to have taken another look at them since.
The Web Now
Today’s Web is quite a different beast: websites are typically far larger, far
more complex, far more important (they are often comprise people’s sole
means of income), and make a lot more money.
With companies like Amazon posting a 2012 revenue of over $60 bil-
lion^2 , Twitter boasting 200 million active users^3 , Google employing almost
2 http://smashed.by/amzn-stock
3 https://blog.twitter.com/2013/celebrating-twitter