Update: OK, OK. I'm getting a lot of responses saying that Gmail is a bad example to use, because it's slow and bloated. I've responded to a few of those commen

Update: OK, OK. I'm getting a lot of responses saying that Gmail is a bad example to use, because it's slow and bloated. I've responded to a few of those comments, but I think it should be addressed on a higher level. To clarify, I said "Gmail showed us", because from what I've read, the early Beta releases are where XHR was born, which is what I view as the birth of web apps. It's the idea that you don't have to pull an entirely new document from a server to update a small part of the view, which translates into a more seamless experience typical of native apps. I think that transforms the web from a simple document transfer system into something capable of behaving like an application. I think the explosion of JS frameworks since then are about how to effectively manage the use of XHR to update the view.