I think you need to look forwards and not back in time for getting back to having fun.
The reason I say this is that we now have 'css grid'. This means that you do not need frameworks, little scripts on the page, and 'div/span' markup, you don't even need ids and classes. You can directly style 'aside', 'main', 'article', 'form', headings, p tags, 'details/summary', 'nav' and other tags to get the desired effect.
If you have a three column layout with the column left and column right as 'aside' then the CSS does not need classes to identify the column names, 'article + aside' will refer to the right column perfectly fine.
This will also work responsively so you can do everything these days with no paddings, margins, floats, line-heights or anything else that is a bit silly.
The resultant code when freed of all this debris that should never have been in HTML is a quarter of the size. I say code, but is it really code when you have button text inside a span inside a span inside a button inside a div inside a div with a label inside another div and yet another div just so it works as the'designer' intended?
For me CSS grid + semantic minimal 'div free' markup is getting back to the fun. No longer do web pages require a team of a designer (that knows no code) plus a front end developer ( that knows nothing about 'real code') plus a backend developer (that knows nothing about design) plus a team manager to book inane meetings and to do scrum rituals as if it mattered.
We can also get rid of lorem ipsum and go 'content driven design' (a phrase I had to invent just now as nobody has had a use case for such a phrase in decades).
Happy times in web design are back on. Even more interesting is that with the likes of Rachel Andrews we also have a lot of women getting into doing web design properly and showing how its done.
The reason I say this is that we now have 'css grid'. This means that you do not need frameworks, little scripts on the page, and 'div/span' markup, you don't even need ids and classes. You can directly style 'aside', 'main', 'article', 'form', headings, p tags, 'details/summary', 'nav' and other tags to get the desired effect.
If you have a three column layout with the column left and column right as 'aside' then the CSS does not need classes to identify the column names, 'article + aside' will refer to the right column perfectly fine.
This will also work responsively so you can do everything these days with no paddings, margins, floats, line-heights or anything else that is a bit silly.
The resultant code when freed of all this debris that should never have been in HTML is a quarter of the size. I say code, but is it really code when you have button text inside a span inside a span inside a button inside a div inside a div with a label inside another div and yet another div just so it works as the'designer' intended?
For me CSS grid + semantic minimal 'div free' markup is getting back to the fun. No longer do web pages require a team of a designer (that knows no code) plus a front end developer ( that knows nothing about 'real code') plus a backend developer (that knows nothing about design) plus a team manager to book inane meetings and to do scrum rituals as if it mattered.
We can also get rid of lorem ipsum and go 'content driven design' (a phrase I had to invent just now as nobody has had a use case for such a phrase in decades).
Happy times in web design are back on. Even more interesting is that with the likes of Rachel Andrews we also have a lot of women getting into doing web design properly and showing how its done.