Development of webpages back in the golden age of the internet was mainly based upon limited number of factors. Back then more than the design, I think they focused more on the idea presented. At the present day we focus on multiple factors not only the ideas but also how it is presented, this is due to the understanding we have gained on human psychology and the possibilities of present technology. There are many designs which are applied in this kind of web design responsive web design. Goal of a responsive webpage is to allow websites to run on any device and adapt to make it more user friendly.
Compatibility of look and feel[flexibility]
Compatibility is an underlining idea of responsive web design in the past which developed further with time. The idea is to give a similar feel and look for multiple devices. Mainly starting from optimizing the scaling of content in the webpage to personalization of themes of the webpage. This used to be considerably hard task which required many lines of code , now with the use of responsive containers the coding is much simpler and easier
Optimizations and quality of life
Another idea of a responsive webpage is how easily it could run on a device and how easily we can work with it(user friendly). Webpages are increasingly becoming more and more user centric. Let’s discuss how the following concept affect the developers and users.
Users
In web design the common practice of the past was to focus on the idea. With improvement of technology, we could better customize the design of a webpage. Which also lead to another problem which is over use of content, where the webpage is full of noise and takes longer time to respond. Which is the reason why currently we are considering the idea and presentation of the idea and also interaction with the idea (will probably improve in the future). A good example of this implementation is the dark theme not only does it make interactions with the webpage more comfortable for the eye but also used to optimize both processor load and battery usage.
Developers
As mentioned before the codes have become simpler, easy to use and also reusable. With this only has web development become easier but also debugging is considerably easier. We will see more technologies in the future , maybe even something like image compression with lines of HTML or Js.