This is an interesting question. I started my professional development career 20 years ago, and there were pretty much 2 types of developer: those that did emb

This is an interesting question. I started my professional development career 20 years ago, and there were pretty much 2 types of developer: those that did embedded development, and everyone else. JavaScript was even more of a shit-show than it is now (except that npm didn't exist), and browser support for, well anything, was terrible and inconsistent. Almost exclusively, server-side rendering was used (e.g. PHP, CGI, dotnet when it arrived a short time later). JavaScript was used sparingly to add interactively when needed. It was only really when npm and specialised front-end frameworks started to arrive that a distinction started to form. At the same time, browser compatibility started to improve, and JavaScript, HTML and CSS finally started to evolve and improve. With those additional capabilities came more complexity, and so front-end has gradually became a more specialised field.