HTTP then HTML then WWW then CSS+JS and then comes Hell

(4 min Read) TLDR; Internet Programming is getting better 

I never liked AJAX or JQuery. I will elaborate why in a while. But first lets retrace the history of internet technologies the way they evolved. Tim Berners Lee thought about a great web that would connect all systems in the world and people could move from one link to another. He used a simple protocol that exchanged information as files. He envisoned a world wide web where files would move from servers to clients(hosts) which displayed these HTML files in web browsers. 

    The protocol that would help in the exchange of these files was called hypertext transfer protocol. The information displayed in a browser was to be formatted and arranged across the screen. This needed setting attributes of html elements. These attributes were to be applied to some/all of the html elements that were specified in the Cascaded Style Sheets.

   Then came the problem of animation and changing properties of some html elements when certain events occured. The events generated like mouse click, timer tick/overflow, arrival of information or completion of a task like page load, they all needed to be handled. Events generated in the browser window like change of width/height or losing focus or being minimized/invisible on screen etc were to be delivered to all elements and those that subscribed these would execute the handler routines. All was well for some time.

Once websites became huge and multiple people started working on the same pages they had problems with co-ordination and would often result in overlapping of work/responsibilities. Resulting in conflict. Then technologies like asynchronous Javascript and XML(AJAX) made it easier to update select parts of the webpage without the entire page reloading. JQuery reduced the amount of code that needed to be written to enable AJAX to work. Also it introduced a simpler syntax that was easier on the programmer. It allowed them to concentrate on the work rather than other routine stuff.

      All this was good if parts of the webpage were not to communicate with each other. This was not the case always. It needed some extraordinary efforts to synchronize display of information and keep the pages consistent and users satisfied. The problems came to a head and it was not as if these were not anticipated. It was just that no one thought hard enough and settled for the easier solution neglecting rarely occurring requirements. 

    Node.js came along that caused a big upheavel and people started taking javascript seriously once the server side also ran on it. Then there was a resurgence in efforts to solve all problems associated with web programming once and for all. 

    Responsive web design, Web application frameworks, progressive web apps and mobile application development caused a huge jump in the number of programmers needed to make them.

    Improvements in Authentication and session state management led to a possibility of a huge number of users being served simultaneously with very little session state maintained on the server. Now sessions are working just based on tokens exchanged between server and client. 

   Json Web Tokens(JWTs), token based access and per API token based service delivery are getting rolled out slowly. Github is moving to it between may to july, This year(2021). Developments in web technology continues unabated. I would say whatever is happening is for the better.