Frameworks, Libraries, Webpacks, all sorts of baggage and endless code clumps are the norm now. They are all suppose to make creating a webpage API a UI wonderland. Really? What ever happened to HTML, CSS, and JS, the magic potion trifecta? Well of course, the "new wave" technologies do make building super complex full-stack web apps easier to manage and construct if you are a skilled climber of learning curves. For those that have a straight forward website to command a presents on the Internet, you only need the trifecta and keen organization skills.

The HTML is straight forward these days. Most of it is templated by your IDE, especially if you use one injected with Emmet. Things to note are a clean set of meta data to explain the purpose of the site, the copyright level, and keywords for search engines to queue off of. You'll want to have a cool favicon and make sure you set the viewport scaled to one-on-one and match the device width of the user. If you're just a plain ol' developer, you won't be using dynamic loading of the title, etc. You are actually going to load pages from the server like in the old days.

The real trick is in the CSS. There is so much more to it in the latest configuration. It's gotten so complete that using a complex language to engage CSS like SASS is a bit overkill. Besides, all these super extenders clog up webpack and the like if you still have to slip into using React. The hidden factor here is the fact that most of your code will be built by others. The node_modules file is filled to the brim with 3rd-party code that has built-in revision creep. If you have a dynamic site with lots of database fetches, then these framework are justified. But if you can get by with personalized vanilla JavaScript, then by all means stick to that.

JavaScript is by its very nature a twisted web of medieval code wrangling, but there are lots of examples of how to organize and conquer JS code. One of the best ways is to take a few of the online courses or watch the YouTube gurus do their thing. It's a good idea to collect cool JS examples to spring on your next web app client.

One of the most complex sets of industrialized coding I've seen lately is trying to jam-set Material-UI into a Next.js rewrite of a full-up React web app that uses active API inputs with backend reads and writes. The decision making process of whether to preload page data for SEO maximization or partial loads on a schedule...argh. If you have a sitemap and have verified with a Google web search and posted these files via your Filezilla uploads, Google and every other crawler out there will find your site.

The days of the static sites are a thing of the past and no ones has seen a hypertext link with a blue line under it in decades. Everything is a button, modal, or slick sliding images but all this can be done to a convincing level without three gigabytes of framework code. You can insert videos, slide in content, fade-in and out content. The limit comes from jumping from a top page and drilling down through content developed from server-side data, pop into a form, and save something back to that database and have it render all over your site instantly. But then who wants to be responcible for maintaining the Amazon site with 10 million products, dynamic discounting schemes, and multiple credit charging choices? Sadly, the answer to that is any young web dev dude that wants a good paying job.