Same. AJAX was around, but quite new. Browser JS engines were hit and miss speed wise. Creating elements in the dom could be super slow depending on the browser

Same. AJAX was around, but quite new. Browser JS engines were hit and miss speed wise. Creating elements in the dom could be super slow depending on the browser. My solution then was to have the server send html as a string and then drop it into an existing element. Felt super hacky at the time haha.