No, Rebecca is right - the game changed for front-end developers when client-side scripting became ubiquitous, which is a somewhat recent development: For exam

No, Rebecca is right - the game changed for front-end developers when client-side scripting became ubiquitous, which is a somewhat recent development: For example, while XMLHttpRequest was introduced in 1999 (IE 5), it took years to gain traction (XHR support was added to Opera with version 8 in 2005), and incidentally, JavaScript frameworks (Prototype 2005, jQuery 2006) and distributed version control (Mercurial, Git 2005) entered the spotlight at the same time. While serious JS-based applications were definitely around before the advent of Web 2.0 (you can go a long way with hidden iframes, long polling, chunked transfer, forms, 204 status code), these were the exception, front-end work was mostly about layout and code-reuse virtually nonexistent.