I would cite early attempts at JS-generated views that I worked on in the late '90s/early '00s (and I assume other people were doing similar things at the time)

I would cite early attempts at JS-generated views that I worked on in the late '90s/early '00s (and I assume other people were doing similar things at the time) and the various RIA frameworks that appeared on the scene circa '04-'05 spawned by Ajax that through no fault of their own tried to rediscover widget-based portal solutions in JS. See Flex, Laszlo and others. Also tried was XUL, all very limited and one-sided. What we're seeing today is are mostly front-end MVC solutions that have a more populist approach towards platform and usability as those two have matured substantially due to the current global propagation of a certain genre of apps. I hate to admit it, but Facebook has done wonders in terms of providing feedback as to how much a user will tolerate beyond static HTML as well as educating the user to accept as standard certain classes of JS functionality as they iterate through implementations.