I don't understand why people think XHR is a cute trick. Desktop applications used nonblocking RPC (as did many other apps) outside of the web for a long time.

I don't understand why people think XHR is a cute trick. Desktop applications used nonblocking RPC (as did many other apps) outside of the web for a long time. So much of the web has been rediscovering and reimplementing (usually in a worse way) the basics of high quality, interactive applications about a decade too late.