So, there's an intermediate phase missing before AJAX. From roughly 1996 until the nascent stages of the AJAX era we used the Refresh attribute. This could be

So, there's an intermediate phase missing before AJAX. From roughly 1996 until the nascent stages of the AJAX era we used the Refresh attribute. This could be a <meta> tag in the header of the HTML content or you could send it as an HTTP header. While some sites refreshed the entire page this way, it was more useful for content served in frames/iframes (like headlines or sport scores or…urgh…advertising).