That's so fucking true. Today, we have static site generators just to be able to use Markdown instead of HTML and a crazy docker construct to do a solution which any of-shelve frameset could do in the 90s. You are proud of your tech stack? We fucking had no tech stack in the 90s and it was great because we could fucking express ourselves without having to deal with reactive scripts, CDNs, sourcemaps, or whatever. And oh yes, we had IE4. We cared a lot about standards and browser compatibility without loading ridiculous megabytes of slow and bloated code.

There are still plenty of people who run sites on the Web like this. While I don't know many commercial static websites - I've included some favorites (philosopher.life, whimsy.space) in my list of Links of the Decade.

https://href.cool/2010s

I also do a periodic "hunt" for static websites.

https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

Let me know if you have one, too.

a few years ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684424