So you've been away for a while. Maybe you moved into management. Maybe you switched to mobile development. Maybe life just happened. And now you're looking at the web again, wondering what you've missed.

The answer? A lot. But here's the good news: almost all of it is good.

The jQuery Era Is Over

Remember this?

jQuery was essential. The browser APIs were inconsistent nightmares. addEventListener didn't work in IE. Ajax required ActiveX objects in older browsers. CSS selectors in JavaScript? Forget about it.

Here's the same thing in 2024:

No library needed. That's just JavaScript now—querySelectorAll, fetch, and template literals. And it works everywhere.

CSS Learned New Tricks

Remember the dark times?

  • Centering a div? Stack Overflow's most-asked question.
  • Variables? You needed Sass or Less.
  • Responsive design? Media queries for every breakpoint.
  • Animations? jQuery's animate() or Flash (RIP).

CSS can do all of this natively now:

And that's not even getting into the wild stuff: container queries, scroll-driven animations, cascade layers, subgrid. CSS is a legitimate programming language now.

The Build Tool Paradox

Here's something ironic: while you were away, the JavaScript ecosystem exploded with build tools—Webpack, Rollup, Vite, esbuild—each promising to solve the problems of the last.

But here's the twist: you might not need any of them.

Browsers now support ES modules natively. You can just write:

For many projects—especially personal ones—you can ship raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Like the old days, but better.

What About React/Vue/Angular?

They're still around. They're still useful for complex applications. But they're no longer required for every project.

The platform has absorbed many of their best ideas:

  • Components? Web Components are native now.
  • Reactivity? Signals are coming to JavaScript itself.
  • Page transitions? The View Transitions API does it natively.
  • State management? The Proxy object enables reactive patterns.

You might still choose a framework, but you won't be forced into one.

The Joy Is Back

Here's what I want you to take away from this post:

The web is fun again.

Not "fun if you learn our 47-step build pipeline." Not "fun if you memorize this framework's way of doing things." Just... fun.

You can open a text editor, write some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and build something real. Something that works across all browsers. Something fast. Something beautiful.

The web platform matured while you were away. It absorbed the best ideas from jQuery, from CSS preprocessors, from JavaScript frameworks. It kept backward compatibility with your old code. And it's waiting for you.

Where to Start

Here's my recommended reading order:

  1. You Might Not Need jQuery — A practical guide to vanilla JS equivalents
  2. CSS Has Superpowers Now — Everything CSS can do that used to require JS or preprocessors
  3. CSS Container Queries — Responsive design finally done right
  4. The View Transitions API — Native page transitions
  5. Building This Blog — Putting it all together

Welcome back. Let's build something.

Further Reading