The evolution of the Jamstack

The evolution of the Jamstack can be easily explained by looking at how the World Wide Web evolved, starting with its most central component, HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

HTML

The very first web pages were simply comprised of text with HTML tags, providing markup instructions with the ability to link pages together. In fact, HTML is often mistaken by the average person as a programming language, but it was, at the most fundamental level, a series of symbols that represented formatting instructions. It still gets included in programming language lists, together with actual programming languages such as C and Java. It is merely a markup language, though, despite having evolved rapidly to now include accessibility and semantic features. This means that it is not much more than markup. In its earliest versions, however, it simply provided general formatting instructions.

For example, we could use an h1 tag to represent the header of a page, which...