
a header with links) and put it on many pages without duplicating the component code. With their help, a developer can create one component(e.g. Tools like Pug and others are Javascript scripts that compile custom HTML syntax into standard HTML. There were(and still are) tools that decreased code duplication.

Using template engines to re-use componentsĪ template engine like Pug allows creating atomic components to avoid code duplication Not an ideal method, but it works well for a plain one-page website. As a result, I should amend the code on every page if I want to change, say, the color of the button placed on every page in a header. The problem with this approach begins when I want to add more pages: I should copy-paste those sidebar and menu codes into the new page. A few more blocks, then some text and buttons, and I got a sidebar, a menu, and a content block with text. I don't need to know any frameworks, additional technologies.

When I was getting started with web development, I put simple blocks into Notepad, adding some CSS styles. Pure HTML, CSS era: simple websites An old and simple website written in HTML Feel free to skip it and read more about Next.js in the next sections. It's a short journey on how do we come up with React.

It's sort of a retrospective on how things were before fancy technologies. How did I develop web apps/websites before Next.js is a React framework that employs the latter to make a developer's life easier when creating web apps. It simplifies development workflow, provides many built-in solutions and optimizations, simply put.
