When you look at the culture of any period, it’s possible to see influences from the past, and certainly in more recent times there’s been a roughly 30-year reach back into the past. During the 80s they looked back at the 50s, the 90s had a lot of 6os influences, I lost count of how many 70s parties I went to in the noughties and most recently we’ve been remembering the 80s through rose-tinted spectacles.

Of course now it’s the 2020s and fashion is starting to look back to the 90s. Max Böck writes about the return of the 90s web but quickly shoots down any return of the dancing baby.

Frankly I’m glad to see serverside rendering top of the list. Whilst web developers often have the fastest computers on the fastest internet connections, most of the world doesn’t. Static content and server-side rendering are great ways of making your content more accessible to more users and search engines. Single Page Applications and JavaScript frameworks have their place, but they should probably be used a lot more sparingly than they are now.

It was also interesting to read about the push back against social media, the return to personal websites, RSS and other stuff that everyone was saying was dead a few years ago. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one returning to my own site. I’m using Jekyll btw, to generate static pages that can be delivered very quickly.

Photo credit: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA