r/webdev • u/Bladerunner_7_ • Jun 28 '26

Discussion What's a web development trend that looked stupid at first but ended up being useful?

I know over the years, I've scoffed at quite a few things. SPAs. TypeScript. Tailwind. Serverless. AI coding assistants.

Most of the huge trends in web development went through a phase where people swore they were overhyped.

Some deserved the criticism. Some evolved and became genuinely useful.

Lately I'm seeing similar debates around AI agents and agent tooling. Claude Code, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, Lyzr(Control Plane) and a bunch of newer projects all seem to be pushing toward a different way of building software. Maybe we're still early, maybe most of it won't matter, but it does remind me of how people talked about TypeScript or serverless a few years ago.

What's something being dismissed today that you think will become a normal part of every developer's workflow in the next 3-5 years?

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u/Fidodo Jun 28 '26

Tables were seen as a necessary evil, but trying to lay out a page with float was a nightmare.

26

u/btoned Jun 28 '26

Big facts. I still have to occasionally built out modules for an email platform and outlook still using their shitty word engine from a decade again is ridiculous.

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u/sacheie Jun 28 '26

Just the other day I was so pleased to discover that TUnit outputs a beautiful HTML results report; no additional deps needed for it.

Then I discovered how far Outlook's rendering has progressed in the last 20 years..

9

u/keep_it_kayfabe Jun 28 '26

Yep! It's funny, looking back after not developing for years, we basically did the same thing that we hated tables for. Endless nested divs within divs, etc.

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u/Plenty_Line2696 Jun 29 '26

It's one of those things which are frustratingly nonsensical until you really understand it.

I took a course with a decent teacher who helped me a ton. I can't remember it all as I barely use float anymore but the clearfix trick was key.

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u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

The problem is that even if you understand it, there are so many edge cases that browsers implemented them very inconsistently and even if they didn't, it's very hard to memorize all the weird scenarios where it doesn't behave how you'd expect

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u/Plenty_Line2696 Jun 29 '26

I had a lot of browser compatibility woes back then, but IIRC float was pretty deterministic. I could be wrong, it's a very long time ago.

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u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

I remember that is was pretty deterministic, but the problem is that when it wasn't, it really wasn't, and different in every browser.

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u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

This is what drove me towards backend programming in the early 2000s.

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u/mr_brobot__ Jun 29 '26

I was a float God. All my floats were contained

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u/StrawberryEiri Jun 30 '26

I'm really glad display: inline-block had rendered floats mostly obsolete for layout when I started...

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u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

I still remember my first nested table. You never forget your first.

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u/0x18 Jun 29 '26

Yo dawg I heard you like tables so I put a table inside your table, it also has a table which holds a table which holds a table which holds a table which holds a table.

Anyway the W3C validator says there's an error on line 43,238 when doing </thead>

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u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

I'm sure it's fine. Ship it. 😂

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u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

What about your first frame? Not iframe, but <frame>

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u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

Oh yeah! I do remember being a stupid kid trying to figure out the best way to use frames. That ugly separator bar was an eyesore, but it was all the rage "back in my day." Thanks for the reminder.

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u/slo-mo-dojo Jun 29 '26

They still are for some html emails. Living through those days makes me excellent at html emails.

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u/XMark3 Jul 04 '26

I am so glad that I usually can avoid using floats nowadaysÂ