XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

Ok, so it might be a long shot, but I would say that

1. the browsers were inconsistent in 1990-2000 so we started using JS to make them behave the same

2. meanwhile the only thing we needed were good CSS styles which were not yet present and consistent behaviour

3. over the years the browsers started behaving the same (mainly because Highlander rules - there can be only one, but Firefox is also coping well)

4. but we already got used to having frameworks that would make the pages look the same on all browsers. Also the paradigm was switched to have json data rendered

5. at the current technology we could cope with server generated old-school web pages because they would have low footprint, work faster and require less memory.

Why do I say that? Recently we started working on a migration from a legacy system. Looks like 2000s standard page per HTTP request. Every action like add remove etc. requires a http refresh. However it works much faster than our react system. Because:

1. Nowadays the internet is much faster

2. Phones have a lot of memory which is wasted by js frameworks

3. in the backend all's almost same old story - CRUD CRUD and CRUD (+ pagination, + transactions)

That timeline doesn't sound right to me. JS was rarely used to standardise behaviour - we had lots of user agent detection and relying on quirks ordering to force the right layout. JS really was for the interactivity at the beginning - DHTML and later AJAX. I don't think it even had easy access to layout related things? (I may be mistaken though) CSS didn't really make things more consistent either - once it became capable it was still a mess. Sure, CSS garden was great and everyone was so impressed with semantic markup while coding tables everywhere. It took ages for anything to actually pass first two ACIDs. I'm not sure frameworks ever really impacted the "consistent looks" side of things - by the time we grew out of jQuery, CSS was the looks thing.

Then again, it was a long time. Maybe it's me misremembering.

For me, JQuery was the thing that fixed the browser inconsistencies. If you used JQuery for everything, your code worked in all the browsers.

This was maybe 2008?