Where do I start with writing a web page nowadays?

Try WebFlow. webflow.com/

All of the HTML and CSS is abstracted away behind a visual editor. They also allow access to external data through API calls.

As far as tutorials, the creator took the time to record over 70 videos, each ranging from 3 to 7 minutes in length. There's literally no excuse not to understand the software. I've been through it all myself and I can vouch for his teaching style: concise, complete, and even hilarious at times.

I'd use it more if I could afford the monthly fee (around $25/mnth). It's the perfect middle ground between coding and designing.

Give it a shot!

WebFlow looks cool, but if you're looking for a more JS-like solution, I recommend Vue. You don't need a whole lot to get started, the HTML/JS/OOP you already know and a single afternoon with the docs should get you up and running. It basically just worked how I expected, and let me forget about the JQuery-style DOM manipulation hell. Especially for a relatively straightforward case, it should just get out of your way and let you write up your webpage. You'll get a nice responsive page for your REST results out of the box by default. It's got an app generation CLI tool that will spit out a working configuration ready to go that isn't too bogged down with cruft.

I used emacs, I'm assuimg vi will suffice. Docker-friendly.

Another option is Svelte, which hits your simplicity requirements but is much younger/less supported. With both, though, you're just writing JS like you expect to.

Well, simple HTML/CSS/JS will do the job. No need fancy frameworks such as Vuejs, React and so on.

If you want good visuals, you can go for Bootstrap, it's one of the most popular CSS framework. But I personally prefer Materializecss that is more simple to use from my point of view.

For the Rest API call, you can do this with basic javascript. But you should look for Jquery, it's a small utility script that you plug to your webpages (<script src="jquery.css"></script>). It just provide simplified functions that replace some complicated javascript ones. For example if you want to select a DOM element by it's ID :

//With javascript only
document.getElementByID('myelementid');

//With jquery
$('#myelementid')

You can then use the JQUERY Ajax utility to POST, GET or UPDATE http requests over your REST API back-end server

$.ajax.post({url:"http://myserver/mymethod/"})
.done((successData=>){
  //Success case code//
})
.fail((failure=>){
  //Fail case code//
})

You success case code can then update DOM elements to display your data.

You have the entire W3C school website for clear documentation and examples : w3schools.com/
The Mozilla documentation pages if you want better documentation coverage, but less clear examples : developer.mozilla.org/fr/

Materialize and Jquery also have clear and useful documentation.

I would say github.com/facebook/create-react-app is the best place to start for a more modern approach.

It is a huge pain to get all of the things set up correctly in order to make even the most basic app in react. That takes the pain out of it, and enforces some industry standard practices. While doing everything in the react-specific way, which does have some learning curve, the amount of documentation and the generally transferable architecture and way of thinking is well worth it.

Since it is industry standard, you get full access to the js ecosystem too, so a lot of the "app" would be stitching things together that other people build and maintain, which is great.

For the "stack", I would just use apollographql.com/docs/tutorial/in...

I would read though reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html, since you're using react. It's a bit dated (using hooks in react is pretty dope), but will get you 100% of the way there, also the apollo docs will give you basically all the express (nodes http server) info you need.

For development, I use code.visualstudio.com/. I used to have an ultra customized vim setup. vscode is better in every way I can think of. And it has vi bindings.