"Third party widgets" was the use case. The idea was to build a marketplace for frontend components, much like existed for Visual Basic, eg. the average web dev

"Third party widgets" was the use case. The idea was to build a marketplace for frontend components, much like existed for Visual Basic, eg. the average web developer would buy/download BobsTreeView.htc and bind an XML file and that would be it. The actual issue was that very few people was doing any serious frontend development back then. Netscape and IE had completely different DOMs and the environments were not super stable. But there was an attitude that frontend was for designers and "real programmers" were backend-only. So the real programmer found a backend component for ASP.NET or GWT and wasn't interested in the frontend sausage. (This article reminded me of the DHTML Dude column[1], and yeah some of us unreal programmers were doing this bleeding edge IE-specific front-end stuff for clients. Then we spent many years atoning for our sins. However, I think 90% of "IE-only" apps never used this stuff, they just had the wrong box model or some dopey ActiveX upload component or something.) [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263969(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263969(v=vs.85).a...