In the 1990's, being "full stack" in web development wasn't that hard: HTML 3.2/4.0, the first release of CSS, some modicum of JavaScript and jQuery, Apache and

In the 1990's, being "full stack" in web development wasn't that hard: HTML 3.2/4.0, the first release of CSS, some modicum of JavaScript and jQuery, Apache and CGI or PHP, and the database, which was probably the biggest surface area of all. If you hired someone to build a web application, it was entirely reasonable that they would be able to do that. Fast forward to today and you can complicate that stack beyond belief. Meanwhile the business side says, "I could hire a full stack developer to build a web app twenty years ago. Why can't I do it now?" It's an entirely reasonable assumption on their part that somehow saying that's not reasonable anymore is prevarication and trying to hide the fact that we screwed up. It's interesting trying to make the case that we haven't. Off the top of my head: - We added accessibility, which makes it possible to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act or comparable legislation elsewhere. - We know that faster interaction improves conversion rates, so we can make a case for at least some of the JavaScript to speed up a user's interaction. - Video and images can have better conversion rates than just text, but that can adversely interact with the last point, so we have to work around that. So the web accessibility guidelines and semantic content, form validation on the fly and any other interactions that can be done within page that would otherwise require a page load (imagine if commenting on Facebook required a submit button and a page reload), and image sets and HTML 5 video. What else can we justify this way?