[gortok]

So until about 2013? 2014? URL-driven state was just the way everything worked.

One of the major complaints of `cgi-bin` was that you had to manually add back to the URL to manage state (and of that time, there were a good number of cgi-bin applications that just didn't bother -- which unsurprisingly is how the SPAs worked at first until "URL Routing" took over).

But, all of this is literally just reinventing the wheel that's been there since the web began. The entire purpose of the web was to be able to link to a specific resource, action, or state without having to to anything other than share a URL.

What's wild is there are whole generations of programmers that started programming after the SPA world debuted and are now re-learning things that "were just the way things were" before 2013.

[packetlost]

tbh I always found it interesting that CGI was dropped as a well supported technology from languages like Python. It was incredibly simple to implement and reason about (provided you actually understand HTTP, maybe that's the issue), and scaled well beyond what most internal enterprise apps I was working on at the time needed.