Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you?

First, a good critique:

This is the first kind of novelty-seeking web developer. The type that sees history only as a litany of mistakes and that new things must be good because they are new. Why would anybody make a new thing unless it was an improvement on the status quo? Ergo, it must be an improvement on the status quo.

But then this commentary on the architecture of the web stood out to me:

By default, if you don’t go against the grain of the web, each HTTP endpoint is encapsulated from each other. From the requester’s perspective the logic of each endpoint could be served by an app or script that’s completely isolated from the others. Fetching from that endpoint gets you an HTML file whose state is encapsulated within itself, fetches its visual information from a CSS endpoint and interactivity from a JS resource. Navigating to a new endpoint resets state, styles, and interactivity.

Moreover, all of this can happen really fast if you aren’t going overboard with your CSS and JS.

It reminds me of the moment when I first learned about the details of authentication on the web. I was at a conference and the presenter said, referring to the underlying HTTP protocols, “the web is stateless”. Having just learned react, this was strange to me. But in listening more, I realized how wonderfully powerful this idea of statelessness can be.

The web’s built-in encapsulation would limit it to trivial toy-like projects if we didn’t have a way to build larger interconnected projects. But, instead of the complex shared state that defines most native apps and SPAs, the web represents state as resources that are connected to and transferred via links.