In the era of extensive front-end frameworks, advanced JavaScript and overly complex CSS, is there a place for websites mostly designed in HTML5? Should a web designer include a plain-vanilla HTML5 site as part of her portfolio? Is there life after React, Vue and Bootstrap?
To all the questions above, the answer is yes. A lot has changed since Sir Tim Berners-Lee published the first HTML web page, but the spirit of being able to do whatever you want can still be enjoyed on the web, even if it means doing it on an individual basis. Web designers seem to have taken things to extremes; if you are skilled with HTML and CSS, it is perfectly fine to design a simple blog without using a framework and calling up countless elements from libraries.
What is interesting about the direction that web design has taken in recent years is that we now have simplified frameworks that run on top of more complex frameworks; case in point, Gatsby, which is based on React but keeps things extremely simple and static websites. Gatsby can be used to make very stylish sites that load extremely fast, and it has been noticed by big names such as Airbnb. There is even a competitor to Gatsby; it is called Jekyll, and it breaks things down to just HTML.
There is a good chance that pure HTML design could be making a comeback, and this is not a hipster trend among web developers. If you are using your bare hands to code websites in 2019, you do not have to be a Luddite or a student, you could just be an old-school type of designer who agrees with many others that things are getting too complicated when they do not need to be.
We all know that progressive web apps play an important role, but they do not need to be 500 MB files if they only show lists of data elements that need some sort of XML requests. If you are coding in pure HTML5 in 2019, you are part of a movement that realizes things could always be simpler. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/c01l06/is_it_all_that_bad_to_make_a_pure_html5_website/.