Web development - Rekindling an Old Pastime

As I recounted in my Linux Journey - Part 0, back in the very early 2000’s I taught myself HTML and CSS to build a very simple website for a family business. In those days, websites were mostly static, the HTML code behind them was frequently non-standard but somehow still worked, and styling via CSS was in its infancy. It was relatively easy to create webpages from scratch. The only component of a website that I did not master was JavaScript (JS). Since the website I was building did not have any interactivity, I did not bother with JS. Also, blogging would not become a thing until a few years later (I believe it was 2004 when I first heard about it), so the tools that we now need for blogging (e.g. templating and index generators) were not yet in (such) demand.

In any case, when the reason for maintaining a business website went away, I stopped following the trends in web development and the skills I had learned in this area went to waste.

Fast forward to 2022, and now I’m having to re-learn all that stuff again to design and maintain this personal website. I feel like web development has advanced at such a rapid rate, I can hardly understand all the new technology that has been introduced. Not only have the HTML & CSS standards become more strict, but websites are now being built like apps (and vice versa)! For this, developers rely heavily on so-called “frameworks”. I still don’t exactly understand how they work, just that they provide a sort of scaffolding that allows you to quickly build websites and apps. It seems every year a new framework becomes all the rage. CSS has frameworks (e.g. Tailwind CSS and Pure CSS) as well as pre-processors, like SaSS and LESS. Since blogging is now a mainstay, there is also a plethora of static site generators (SSG) to help the blogger maintain his/her site: there’s Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, Pelican, etc. It’s all a bit overwhelming, to say the least. Nevertheless, I’m committed to continue the learning process.

The only major problem for me is that, since I’m also committed to computing minimalism, I fear that following the standard path will lead me in the opposite direction. What is a poor minimalist n00b to do?