You could do interactive web apps before XMLHttpRequest by using frames--plain frames, then later iframes. Circa 2001 I wrote an employee clock-in and reporting

You could do interactive web apps before XMLHttpRequest by using frames--plain frames, then later iframes. Circa 2001 I wrote an employee clock-in and reporting web application this way, which made it much more responsive, especially over a modem. It used frames to push and pull data (i.e. JavaScript variables) dynamically, and Layers on Netscape and nascent innerHTML on IE to rebuild tables with new data. The latter techniques I had learned from a truly pioneering developer publishing demos in what was called DHTML (dynamic HTML), an early name for JavaScript-driven, client-side page generation and manipulation that went beyond basic img src swapping. Among other things, that developer had written an amazing Asteroids clone. I forgot their site name; it was Dyn-something. Unfortunately, IIRC IE was rather leaky and the app started to crawl if you used it too much without refreshing the entire page. (I left that job before the app went live, so I don't know if they deployed it as-is or reverted to full server-side mode.) IMO, what really made interactive web apps more practical was both Netscape and IE--but especially IE--getting their act together and writing a browser that didn't leak memory life a sieve when you made heavy use of their new APIs for manipulating the document dynamically. EDIT: Dan Steinman and DynAPI: https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/ https://www.dansteinman.com/dynduo/