AEM and Edge Delivery Services: Bringing the Web Back to the Roots

Not too long ago, building websites was pretty simple, like one text file and a dream. You wrote a bit of HTML, sprinkled some CSS in, and maybe threw in a bit of vanilla JavaScript if you were feeling fancy that day. The browser did its thing, and boom - you had a website. That was it. It had to be - it was all your 56k connection could handle.

Then came high-speed internet and V8 - the frameworks, build tools, libraries, and endless layers of abstraction all began. Somewhere in the whirlwind of bundling, transpiling, and polyfilling, the internet drifted away from its original simplicity and forgot how powerful plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript could be.

But recently, while working with Adobe’s Edge Delivery Services and Document Authoring, I felt something familiar - like that iconic handshake noise from dial-up. EDS brought me back to the roots of the web: content first, driven by HTML, styled by CSS, and fast by default.

This post is about that feeling - remembering how the web was meant to be built. Why? Because in a world of bloated front-ends and overcomplicated stacks, simplicity matters more than ever.

The Early Web: Straightforward, Honest, Fast

There was beauty in how straightforward the early web was. You opened up a text editor, wrote some HTML, added a bit of inline CSS, and if you needed interactivity, maybe you tossed in a script tag with some vanilla JS. That was the workflow. No build steps. No deployments. No dependencies. You FTP it up to a server and you were good.

It worked. It was fast. Anybody could access it. It didn’t break on slower machines or load 3MB of minified JavaScript just to render a paragraph. You could “View Source” and actually learn something. It was raw - what you wrote was what got rendered. No magic. No guesswork.

Developers had full control, and the barrier to entry was low. You didn’t need a CS degree or a 20-part course on a framework’s lifecycle methods. You just needed a browser, a text editor, and an idea.

When The Web Got Fat

Then came Chrome’s V8 engine - and with it, the modern JavaScript renaissance. Suddenly, JS wasn’t just a toy. It was fast, powerful, and everywhere. At first, it felt like magic… but really, we just opened Pandora’s box.

We started making mountains out of molehills. A site that used to be a few static files now needed a stack of dependencies, a bundler, a compiler, and half your RAM just to spit out “Hello World.” npm install became a ritual and not like your skin care routine. More like summoning a demon that breaks you and your build.

We built layers on top of layers. Tools to manage our tools. Abstractions for things that were never complicated in the first place. The front-end world became obsessed with “apps” instead of documents. And somewhere in the chaos, we lost sight of the basics: HTML for structure, CSS for style, and JS for behavior.

Enter Adobe Document Authoring: Just Content

Adobe's Document Authoring - honestly? A breath of fresh air. At first glance, it looks like you're just editing a Word doc. That’s because... you pretty much are. It’s built for collaboration, simple to use, and is easy to learn. Just clean content that’s easy for anyone to contribute to.

That doc you’re editing isn’t just sitting somewhere waiting to be copy-pasted into WordPress. It becomes the page. What you write there is what gets delivered to the web - no headless chaos, no markdown to React to JSON to something pipeline.

It’s content-first in the best way possible. You don’t need to engineer your way around writing - you just write and that shift alone is huge. It means you spend less time trying to glue systems together and more time focusing on what actually matters: the message.

What EDS Actually Is - And Why It Works

Adobe Edge Delivery Services (or EDS, for short; you might’ve seen this floating around as Project Helix or Adobe Franklin) feels like a quiet revolution. On paper, it sounds almost too simple: content in an Adobe DA document (or Word, or SharePoint, or Google Docs), structured with tables and headings, then delivered to the web using blocks of vanilla JS and CSS. No build tools. No deployment scripts. No complex CMS integrations. Just write, save, and ship.

And somehow... that’s the point.

It’s the kind of setup that makes you stop and ask, “Wait, why did we complicate this?”

Instead of turning everything into an app, EDS turns documents into websites - the way the internet originally worked.  The document focuses on the content. If you need layout or interactivity, you use blocks. Each block is just a chunk of logic (Content + CSS + JS) that knows how to interpret the structure of the document and turn it into clean, efficient HTML. If you can read a Google Doc and inspect a table, you can figure out how a block works.

Even better, all the code is open-source on GitHub, the dev workflow is Git-based, and you can see what any block is doing in real time with browser extensions like the AEM Sidekick. It’s modern in all the ways that matter, without being weighed down by all the things that don’t.

Why This Actually Matters

All of this simplicity isn’t just nostalgic - it’s practical. When you strip away the noise and focus on delivering real HTML with a little CSS and JS, everything gets better.

EDS sites are fast - like, 100 Lighthouse score fast - because there’s no bloated JS framework weighing things down. You're shipping HTML, not bootstrapping an app just to show a picture of a cat.

Accessibility and SEO? It’s in there. Clean HTML means screen readers and search engines actually understand your content. No hacks no hoops.

Dev experience? I dropped out of college. You’re not wrangling configs or debugging a broken build at 2 am because some package deep in the chain went sideways. You build a block. You style it. You touch grass.

Content workflow? Let them cook. Writers and editors work in tools they already know - Google Docs, Word, SharePoint - and their updates go live. No gatekeeping. No Jira tickets for “can you add a space to that sentence?”

In short: it’s faster to build, easier to maintain, and more accessible to everyone involved - from devs to authors, to users.

Back to the Future

It’s easy to think that progress means adding more tools, more layers, more abstraction. But sometimes, the best thing you can do is strip it all back and remember what made the web great in the first place.

Adobe Document Authoring and EDS don’t just make things easier - they make things clearer. They give devs and content creators a common language again. They remind us that HTML, CSS, and JS - just the basics - are still incredibly powerful.

Maybe it’s not about reinventing the web. Maybe it’s about getting out of its way.

Want to dive deeper into Edge Delivery Services?
Explore how it can transform your content delivery by checking out our blog on Document Authoring for Edge Delivery or listen to our podcast discussion on YouTube.

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