WebDev Post #7127 · source on Telegram
HTML Was Naked For Four Years Before CSS Was Born
Description
A Twitter thread screenshot. Colin Armstrong (@colinarms) tweets: 'HTML is 28 years old. CSS is 24 years old. JavaScript is 25 years old.' (with a mind-blown emoji). Navdeep (@dev_navdeep) replies: 'So you are saying HTML was without clothes for 4 years.' (62 likes). Akshay Parmar (@_The_Akshay) adds: 'And without brain for 3 years.' (56 likes). The joke brilliantly personifies web technologies: CSS as HTML's clothing (visual styling) and JavaScript as its brain (logic/behavior), noting the gap years between their creation
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26Comment deleted
HTML spent 4 years unstyled and 3 years brainless - or as we call it today, a successful MVP launch strategy
Given how many enterprise portals still look like 1995, it’s clear some products never scheduled that long-overdue wardrobe - or lobotomy - upgrade
After 28 years, HTML is finally old enough to realize that its mid-life crisis wasn't about getting a new framework every year, but accepting that tables were never meant for layout and divs aren't semantic enough for everything
This thread perfectly captures the awkward adolescence of the web stack: HTML strutting around in its semantic underwear for four years before CSS showed up with a wardrobe, then both of them sitting there like static mannequins for three more years until JavaScript finally gave them a personality. It's the tech equivalent of watching your framework mature from 'it renders' to 'it has opinions about everything' - except this evolution took nearly a decade and we're still dealing with the trauma of those formative years every time we have to support IE11
The web spent four years without CSS and three without JS, yet those pages still hit sub‑100ms TTFB - try that with a 2MB CSS‑in‑JS bundle
The web shipped structure first, styling later, and a JS brain last - then spent 25+ years inventing CSP, same‑origin, bundlers, and TypeScript to keep that brain from executing whatever the CDN sneezes in
HTML bootstrapped the web naked and brainless for years, yet it's still the only layer seniors trust when frameworks evaporate in prod
Those were beautiful and happy years Comment deleted
haunts you with ActiveX Comment deleted
Choose your way warrior: ActiveX, Java Applet, or Flash/AS Comment deleted
Silverlight Comment deleted
I will pretend that I never heard about Microsoft Flash 🌚 Comment deleted
That was a decade later Comment deleted
Only happy, not beautiful. Comment deleted
the internet 1.0... Comment deleted
I think we can all agree that it has brain now, but it is dumb as hell Comment deleted
HTML was great for 3 years Comment deleted
Document delivery platform with layer after layer of hack to make applications possible Comment deleted
We need to start over, the web is dead, now it’s just a way to deliver 50mb React apps Comment deleted
I feel the same to be honest with you. But backwards compatibility is a bitch. I feel like it’d have to be a huge project supported by the biggest tech companies where they’d develop something closer to Swift UI that initially transpiles to the regular old HTML, CSS, JS — but then just add direct support for it in the browser. So we’d be able to make full-blown apps and I think with such architecture these apps would be PWAs by default. If you want to install one — no need for additional config. Since it’s already an app. Comment deleted
Google tried something like that in the early 2010s with Dart, it was intend as a successor to Javascript Comment deleted
No, you’ve just layered more shit on the cake Comment deleted
Time was an OS and browser fit in 1.44MB Comment deleted
What if I told you you could install another program on your computer that uses the Internet but is not a web browser Comment deleted
We just need that new browser: designed for purpose rather than evolving into shape Comment deleted
I have mixed feelings about putting JS and brains in a single sentence. Comment deleted