AJAX originated as an obscure hack put in IE by a Microsoft employee. The only reason it made such a splash later is that other people tried it, found they coul

AJAX originated as an obscure hack put in IE by a Microsoft employee. The only reason it made such a splash later is that other people tried it, found they could use it to do cool things, and then spread the word. HTML5 could make just as big a splash. Someone making local storage work seamlessly in a large webapp would be noteworthy, and take away the biggest problem with Chrome OS: can't work offline.